“I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.”
William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
“…the chance and probability of meddling interference arising out of the disapprobation of all communities of men toward any situation which they do not understand.”
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
I was listening to NPR this morning while driving to work, and heard Fred Bauer, a Democratic activist residing in Vigo County, Indiana say: “If [Obama] were a white man, I’d say he’d be way out in front here and nationally.” He reminded the reporter interviewing him that his county had a Ku Klux Klan chapter at one time. This coming on the heels of a Seattle Times front page article this weekend suggesting that our fair state is not free from racism, quoting some jerk in a bar using the “n” word when speaking of Mr. Obama.
I am not surprised that there are a lot of racists in the world, many of them living in the closets of America. While it isn’t appropriate in polite society these days to engage in overt racism, what we all think in the privacy of our minds and homes is unregulated and unreported. It is in the dark that the worm of racism keeps its faith and plies its trade. When it pokes its head into the light of day – such as the lady in the red t-shirt telling John McCain that Barack Obama is an Arab, while strongly suggesting by her demeanor that to be an Arab is to be an abomination – one can only shudder at the illiteracy at racism’s roots, the raw stupidity of its motivation, and the power of its hatred.
Why is it that racism continues to be prevalent in the world? As much as we like to think that there has been substantial progress in defeating racism, it keeps rising in various ways. It ranges from the pure evil of the Holocaust to the simple snub of someone due to the fact of their race. Who among us hasn’t wondered about how “those people” can possibly think or act the “way they do?” What is it that keeps us all in fear of others who are seemingly different from us?
I have come to believe that we are hard-wired to discriminate and that our innate ability to do so stems from one of our strongest survival traits. Among the many things that allowed a puny species, mankind, to become dominant on the planet when we weren’t the strongest, fastest, or most ferocious of the beings that inhabited the earth during our infancy as a species, were the traits of tool making, communication, bipedalism and the ability to classify. We were good at classification of the many things that were dangerous in the world, including other members of our own species. It is a very, very tiny step from the ability to classify and label to the vice of discrimination. In fact, one could easily argue that discrimination is nothing more than the obverse of classification.
If I am correct in this supposition, then we discriminate invariably and without real thought. If true, I suppose one could use this as an excuse for the behavior, and thereby forgive everyone their discrimination on the basis that they had no choice. For me, however, just the reverse is true – not only isn’t it an excuse for poor behavior, but it is a trait that we must haul out into the bright light of day, acknowledge openly and fight against mightily, if we are ever to succeed as a truly mature species. In short, we need to train ourselves to fight a crucial aspect of our own nature.
While the greatest cost of discrimination is the harm, physical and emotional, that we cause to others, it also has side effects which are damaging to the practitioner. Not only does it impede our moral self worth, it also keeps us from celebrating the uniqueness of mankind. To me, this latter result is the most interesting side effect of discrimination. The ways of mankind in surviving the period between birth and death are wonderfully amazing and varied. As a species, we are incredibly creative and resourceful. We have created a myriad of philosophies to explain and govern our lives and we have engaged in explorations of the soul, the mind, the earth and the heavens. Mankind has survived in garbage dumps and in Antarctica; in the cities and in sheep herding camps in remote locations across the world.
Discrimination prevents us from seeing these matters for what they really are – an incredible patchwork quilt of life, each episode devoted to a participant succeeding in the particular environment into which he or she was thrust by fate. The fog of discrimination keeps us from the communal celebration of these varied achievements, and keeps us, instead, focused upon the negative aspects of “them.” By focusing on the minutiae, we miss the magnificence of the sum.
I am not trying to argue that there aren’t bad people whom we would all do better to avoid like the plague; I am trying to argue that they come in all sizes, hues, shapes and temperaments. To let the few control our overall thinking about the many is to give in to the thuggery of those few. To allow a few of any stripe cause us to dismiss out of hand the rest of mankind that goes by that same stripe is to deny ourselves appreciation of the wonder of their achievements as a group. To never speak to anyone who thinks differently from you is to deny yourself the ability to learn, to grow, and to challenge yourself about your own preconceived ideas.
When I watched the repeat of McCain’s interaction with the lady in the red t-shirt, I had two reactions: (a) maybe a little bit of the real John McCain still lives, and maybe he is trying to come out and play with the big boys, and (b) how sad for the lady that she has to be mired in her ignorance, fear and incoherence. Hers is a mind I do not wish to emulate; hers is a mind that is a typical result of becoming blinded by racism and discrimination.
Here in Humptulips County, as in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, all is not beer and skittles, as my grandmother used to say. We have our share of bigots and their bigotry knows many guises. But I, at least, will continue to marvel not only at the physical beauty of our little corner of America, but also at the beauty and joy that has been created by all of its inhabitants.
And, while doing so, I pledge to do my best to overcome my inclination to toss everyone wearing a red t-shirt into a box marked “conservative bigot.”
