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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.