By Christina L. Glaser
This article is written in response to Maegan Carberry’s
insightful and honest column on race relations (“Bashing
whites hinders struggle against racism,” Viewpoint, June 2).
Carberry’s column approached a taboo subject that has been
long overdue for discussion.
One of Carberry’s points in particular stood out to me as
being an important one to take note of. It is this: one of the
biggest reasons that racism still exists in our society is our fear
of the hatred of the other. We, regardless of our race or color,
frequently assume that we are hated by others who are of a
different race or background than we are.
People often feel hesitant to approach or to talk to someone
whose skin is a different shade than their own, not because they
feel that the other person is somehow inferior or not worth talking
to, but because they are afraid that they will automatically be
disliked simply because of the way they look.
These people would be surprised, however, if they simply tried
to talk to people of different races and ethnicities. There have
been times in my life when I have assumed that certain people would
dislike me because of my skin color. Some of these times, I was
right. But most of the time, people are friendly to strangers,
regardless of their color. If we approach people who are different
from ourselves with kindness and openness, we will almost always
receive a kind and open welcome in return.
This may sound like a highly optimistic way of looking at race
relations, but I promise that anyone who tries to approach new
faces with kindness, ignoring his or her own initial fears, will be
surprised at just how friendly people really are, and surprised at
just how easy unity can be.
But we must get over our fears of rejection in order for this
approach to work. So what if one person doesn’t like you
because of the color of your skin? This is no reason to avoid
people who are truly no different than ourselves.
One of the hardest things to get over is the reactionary anger
we feel when we are the targets of racism. It is easy to simply
redirect our own anger toward all of those who we feel have
victimized us, all of those who we feel are being awarded
privileges that we do not have because of our race. It is much
harder to turn the other cheek, to remember that it is not an
entire race of people who have personally wronged us, but bigoted,
ignorant individuals whose actions are not representative of an
entire group of people.
This is not to say that institutionalized racism should be
ignored or can easily be shrugged off. Such racism still exists in
our society and should be fought with legislation, protest and by
any other means that are necessary to correct the damage done by
centuries of legalized injustice.
But legislation cannot force us to shake hands with our
neighbors. Laws cannot make us talk to the people we avoid, the
people who we fear hate us at face value but who may not actually
hate us at all. If we truly want to improve the racial situation in
America, we all have to be willing to ignore our fears of rejection
and approach those who have been the symbol for our greatest
insecurity ““ the fear of not being liked.