Friday, February 28, 1997
Equal not identical
TOLERANCE:
African American History Month’s last day calls for reflectionBy
Patricia J. Gentry
Recently, I was having lunch with a friend of mine who is
African American. During the meal, a slim blue packet of artificial
sweetener slipped off the table. My friend scooped it up and
pressed it into my hand. "There," she said, "we are ‘equal’!" I
laughed and said, "Of course!" But inwardly I smiled knowing that
in my love and admiration for her she is a lot more than merely
equal; she is a cut above. Her gentle jest was a sharp reminder to
me of the horrible history shared by European Americans and African
Americans on this continent and the uncertainties that it can
create even within the bounds of close friendship.
In this month when we celebrate African American history, it
seems that there is a need to straighten out our thinking on the
subject of equality. Human beings have a tendency to confuse
equality with identity in the logical or mathematical sense of the
words. Identical means "exactly the same as" whereas equality means
"having the same value as." There is a vast difference between
these two concepts. Two things do not have to be identical in order
to be equal. We do not have to be exactly the same as another
person to have the same value.
The need for identity is rooted in ancient survival instincts.
Recent studies have revealed that Africa is the great mother pool
of human genetics. The human race emerged in Africa and the
migration into the rest of the world did not begin until 112,000 to
280,000 years ago. In fact, all non-African racial diversity may
not be much older than 100,000 years. This diversity came about as
groups left, taking with them their own unique portion of the
original gene pool.
As these groups developed in isolation they came to differ in
appearance from one another. Even from one village to the next
there was a different look that was identifiable with that village.
At the same time each group was struggling to learn what sustained
life and what did not in their particular environment. Each group
discovered a distinct means of survival that evolved as the unique
food, clothing, customs, rituals and mythology of that group. A way
of life that worked soon became a closely guarded tradition. Any
other way of life became a threat to the survival of the group and
was met with hostility. Difference in appearance was the most
obvious indication of such a threat because it marked one as an
outsider. Identification with the group was not just a desirable
social position  it defined survival itself.
As modern humans we retain our need for identity. We identify
with our families as children. As adolescents we seek to connect to
our peers through fads in dress, music and speech.
When we are adults our relationships, home, job and religion
form our group identity. To have any one of these points of
stability threatened, much more violently removed, will send most
of us searching for our therapist’s phone number. The African
people had every single underpinning of their identity stripped
from them when they were first brought to the New World. They were
placed in a position of being perpetually the outsider; excluded
from every opportunity to be part of the group identity. The very
fact that they survived this extreme trauma is a testimony to the
strength, courage and resilience of the African people. But African
Americans not only survived; they achieved. In the face of
monumental opposition they left a mark on the character of the
nation that not only would we be poorer without, we would be
unrecognizable as the America we know today.
To eliminate racism is the single most important thing that we
can achieve.
But how can we approach such a vast, complex and deep-rooted
problem? We must exterminate racism where it lives: inside our own
minds. Racism is a problem of social identity. The goal is
ultimately to identify ourselves as the human race in all of our
marvelous diversity. But this may be a long way off. If we can not
yet do that, and there are many on all sides of this issue who are
not ready to do that, then we must come to a recognition of
equality, which is identical value, even in the midst of our
differences.
Can we say we have made any progress in this long history?
Yes, we can. The Civil Rights movement and the work of Dr.
Martin Luther King have not been without effect. African Americans
have gained greatly in visibility both in the media and in high
profile professions. Oprah Winfrey is one of the most beloved women
in the world as well as being one of the richest and most powerful.
The death of Bill Cosby’s son, Ennis, was a death in everyone’s
family. Visibility produces familiarity, and familiarity is the
first step toward identification. The mass media for all the
criticism leveled at it is actually bringing us closer together and
expanding our concept of identity. The world is in our living room
every evening. We can see that a mother weeping for her child in
Bosnia is the same as a mother weeping for her child in Somalia or
in Oklahoma. The commonalties of human experience will eventually
provide the means by which we can begin to become a global
community. But what about the people we live with and are in
contact with every day? After the Los Angeles uprising in 1992,
thousands of people, the majority of them European American,
following the example of actor James Almos poured into South
Central to help clean up and aid the community in restoring itself
to order. This definitely did not happen almost 30 years earlier
when similar protests broke out in Watts. Is this evidence of
progress enough? Of course not.
Our prejudices have been passed down to us and sometimes
passively accepted by us from a time when there was no mass
communication except newspapers which were controlled by economic
interests. Few people traveled more than 20 miles from their place
of birth and the opinions of those around were the only ones
available for the majority of people.
In such conditions misinformation and lies flourish.
It is safe to say that there is less open bigotry than there was
a few years back. But in its place has come a lot of uncertainty
and confusion. Even well-meaning European Americans will say things
like, "I don’t judge people by the color of their skin." Or, "I
look at the inside not the outside." What must be pointed out is
that phrases like this tacitly imply that there is something wrong
with this "outside" that we must magnanimously overlook.
This is utter nonsense. One collection of human traits is not
intrinsically better than any other collection. Shakespeare said,
"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
This is what we must do: clean up our thoughts and clean up our
act. We must actively eliminate these passively accepted thoughts
we have inherited from our relatives, friends and acquaintances.
Unexamined and undetected, they have a way of surfacing when they
can damage other people.
Now is the time to take inventory and cast out the remaining
demons of an old and destructive way of thinking.
One of the greatest tragedies of the consequences of racism is
that it has forced many African Americans into the mind-set of
constantly monitoring their environment for racist content. This
was absolutely necessary for the sake of survival in a hostile
world. However, I would like to respectfully submit that it may now
be more destructive to the person doing the monitoring than to the
people being monitored. Consider the following example: person A is
African American, person B is European American. A and B are
approaching a doorway and arrive fairly simultaneously. If person B
goes through the door first, person A may think, "It’s like I’m not
even here." If person B allows person A to go through first the
thought may be, "Probably doesn’t trust me." It is plain to see
that there is no possible scenario where person A will not feel the
impact of racism. It really doesn’t matter whether person B has
racist thoughts or not; person A is doing it for him. This is an
understandable way of thinking, given the experience of history,
but unfortunately it has kept many African Americans from reaching
out to realize their full potential.
If we are to finally defeat racism, we must all work together
toward the goal. European Americans must do some thorough soul
searching to remove the last vestiges of the archaic thinking of
our destructive past. African Americans must bring themselves to
lessen their certitude of encountering such thinking. Perhaps it
seems an impossible task. But, someday, our descendants will look
back on the racism of the 20th century in somewhat of the same
light in which we presently view the Salem witch trials: as a
period of human insanity that is well left behind us. The monarch
butterflies migrate from Canada to Mexico each year. The lifetime
of any one butterfly is too short to make the entire trip. So they
do it in three generations. For them to make it, each generation
must do their part to fly as far and as fast as they can or else
the succeeding generations will not reach their goal. Perhaps we
are like those butterflies. We may never see the goal reached
ourselves but we owe it to the generations that come after to go as
far and as fast as we can.
As we complete African American History Month, it is a time for
European Americans to reflect on the long journey of our fellow
citizens of African ancestry. It is a time to recall their
hardships and celebrate their triumphs in the face of overwhelming
odds. It is a time to admire the accomplishments of African
Americans today and to remember that they are the descendants of
heroes.