Apathy is the only “Enemy”
There has been a great deal of discussion around race in America the past week or so. Some of it — like presidential candidate Barack Obama’s speech on the subject is uplifting, even where it misses the mark. The nature of this discussion is labyrinthine and fraught with peril because so many people invest so much energy into exactly how they identify as a race to other people, and also because the wounds of Americas frustrated journey from slave owning nation to the notion that we are all equal under the eyes of god and our own “laws”. It is perhaps the perfect irony that we began as a nation by declaring boldly in our Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Much has been said about this famous passage from our most sacred of holy documents; this “declaration” of independence. But in my opinion, not enough weight is given to the power of its words to speak to our inner most desires to be FREE to live our own lives our own way — for better or worse. Instead the Declaration is read submerged in context: This is specifically a document whereby the founders declared their independence from the British Empire. No more and no less. Little attention is paid it seems to the opening passage, which describes the course which must — by definition — lead from irreconcilability towards ultimate separation. It is as inexorable as the movement of the planets.
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
These two passages when examined in this way reveal a problem that was born simultaneously with our nation. “Here is the the truth”, they seem to say. “You are all children of god. Human. Equal.” What they could not say was that though they clearly saw the problem — ” Our representative democracy is blessed by the divine spark of God itself, comprised of citizen-kings, each equal under the eyes of the law, god and man” — is flawed to the core of its own value system because it allows men to own other men as slaves. But look to the preamble again for a clue as to how they must have known this would all turn out. Separatism lead to an eventual civil war and the emancipation proclamation. Separatism also lead to the civil rights movement, which has led us all here — some kicking and screaming still — where we find ourselves today.
Who among us can lay claim to a tale of vicious beatings visited on fathers who dared exercise the right to vote? And what of the innumerable lynchings for the crime of miscegenation? Young black men who appeared threatening were often killed because they dared look at a white woman. It is within my own life time, and I am 38 years old — that interracial marriage has been declared “legal”* in the United States. Can any white person honestly say that they remember a time when the very act of ordering food at a fast food counter was considered an act of revolution?
Race is so hard to talk about because race is so hard to talk about. I suspect the reverse is true also.
What is race?
Is it about family blood lines, and generations of offspring, traced through time and place and ending with your birth or the birth of your own children? Is it about “where you come from” and where your ancestors homeland lays on the worlds stage? Is it about national identity and pride in the history and achievements of that particular nation, above all others? Who then shall I swear my allegiances to if I am 20% Scot, 20% German, 25% Irish, 25% French and a mixture of Navajo and Italian with a smattering of Jew thrown in? What if I had a single drop of “black blood?” I wonder… What would I be then?
The truth is I am nothing particularly interesting racially. Though each of those peoples have accomplishments to point at in their histories, they also have, well… Histories. Pride in such a thing for the sake of feeling pride seems empty and contradictory indeed. But what if I were “black”? What if our nations own history served as a daily reminder that my grandparents couldn’t vote and that my parents were beaten, sprayed with fire hoses and occasionally killed outright for daring to assert their own equality in the turbulent and divided 1960’s? What if I told you that in the 1970’s we moved to Chicago or LA and my father — a college graduate — was forced to take work as a laborer in a mill somewhere while white men his junior — with only high school diplomas — surpassed him and were promoted and eventually became my fathers boss, though they lacked intellect, temperament or ambition. What if I told you that this impacted my ability to get a decent education, because my parents couldn’t afford a prep school and the local tax revenue all but collapsed as everyone who wasn’t black — and many who were — fled the neighborhood for greener pastures?
Would you understand my anger? Could you empathize with my resentment?
But the truth is I am not black. I grew up poor but everyone expected great things from me. Older people smiled as I passed them on the street and waved at me. I didn’t have to work against the expectations of white people because I was — and still am — one of them. Intellectually I can listen to the anger, I can read the stories, and perhaps even come to understand — a little — where my black brothers and sisters are coming from, but I can never truly grasp what it means to grow up with an invisible stigma attached to you as a person, and know deep down that everyone who know love or have relations with is attached to it as well.
When we judge one another by race we judge through the lens of our own experience. Those who have made it to the top of our society tend to believe that anyone can, and they are absolutely right of course. Those nearer the bottom are more prone to feel as if the deck is stacked against them in some way, and it totally is.
Race is hard to talk about because it is hard to talk about. And I suspect the reverse is also true. In fact, I believe that the reverse of the reverse is true as well. It is my heartfelt and personal belied that we must each — regardless of our race, or relative lack thereof — must examine our expectations about each other and the world. We must look critically at our beliefs, so that they might evolve with our collective and individual wisdom, as god surely intended. We must always resist the temptation to strike out in anger or retribution for sleights both real and imagined. We must all come to examine — in a true and meaningful way — our own prejudices, so that we are able to one day reconcile those that belong to the people who “aren’t like us” because unless we learn to have discussions about the hard things — as openly as possible — we are doomed to separation from each other and from ourselves. There can be no short changing the muse if we are truly to be “free”.
*In 1967, the Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia struck down the last of the anti-miscegenation laws in the United States
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