Unity: Why We Don't Have It

In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled, in a landmark decision, that segregation in schools and in society was unconstitutional. It would take another twenty years to integrate schools. In the meantime an entire Civil Rights movement occurred and even a Civil Rights Act, all with the intent that previously second class citizens could have equal rights and equal protection under the law. Did it do some good? Of course it did. But if you think true equality has been achieved, you haven’t been watching the news for the last year and a half. There are actually people who would tell you that racism died with the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Those people would be white. Then there are some who will admit there is a problem and throw up their hands with the attitude that nothing can be done about this. It’s just what we do. Racism will always exist. It’s human nature. I say that’s bullshit. I’ve seen proof of it. Here’s the primary reason racism continues.

But first, we need to clarify something. Everyone has bias. It’s hard not to. I have a positive bias for the New Orleans Saints. I love my team. I have a favorite. I might also have a bit of disdain—a negative bias—for the Atlanta Falcons. That comes with the territory. I also have a bias for my own family. I’d generally make my own family a priority in most cases. Who wouldn’t? Everyone has bias. It’s not even out of the question to prefer to hang around people with similar ethnic, cultural, or religious particulars. Prejudice, however, is a strong negative bias against a group of people with some kind of commonality. It lumps everyone in that group together, regardless of a person’s individuality. Combined with unfair stereotypes and assumptions about everyone in that group, prejudice becomes a strong negative attitude that breeds hatred and can lead to discrimination, which is prejudice-based action against members of that group. It assumes the worst in people, rather than the best.

Racism, however, takes on a different social dynamic. Racism occurs under the social framework of the powerful and the powerless. This dynamic exists throughout society. Bosses and workers. Teachers and students. Parents and children. There are people or groups in power. They want to stay in power. So they do what they can to maintain the status quo and remain dominant. The wealthy want to preserve their wealth and influence. Politicians concern themselves with reelection. Teachers enact rules and consequences to maintain order in their classrooms. With racism, there is a dominant cultural, racial, social, or religious group who seeks to maintain that status quo. Muslims, in some countries, are intolerant of Jews or Christians. In South Africa, the minority white population has historically sought to restrict the rights of blacks. In the US, you could be a minority in a certain neighborhood and be singled out for racism; white in a black neighborhood, black in a Hispanic neighborhood, and so on. And of course, there are plenty of white Americans in our country who seek to restrict the rights of black, Hispanic, Muslim, and even Native American groups.

Whether we’re talking about prejudice, discrimination, or racism, there is one thing in common with all of it. It’s indoctrinated. It’s taught. What you learn about people of other groups depends on one’s environment. That doesn’t mean that a person brought up with prejudice can’t change their minds. That decision to evolve one’s viewpoint also is a product of environment. As an educator, I’ve taught in a variety of these environments. Personally, I was schooled in a small, all-white private school in a little south Louisiana town. I went to college with thirty thousand people of all kinds of racial and ethnic backgrounds. I have taught in 100% black schools in impoverished neighborhoods. I have taught in predominantly white suburban schools. But currently, I teach in a school situated in the most richly diverse neighborhoods you can imagine. Every day, I teach white, black, Latino, Muslim, Catholic, Mormon, Native American, Pakistani, Vietnamese, Buddhist, Bengali, Arab, German, British, Hmong, Laotian, Samoan, Tongan, gay, straight, transgender, and Jewish kids. And I’m just scraping the surface. Do you know what I don’t see a lot of in my school? Racism. Prejudice. Bullying. Discrimination. These kids all grow up together. They see each other as people, and only people. No one is vying for dominance as a group. There is no us or them. No status quo. Everyone gets to be unique, and everyone gets along despite the differences in view, culture, language, and creed.

This has taught me that de facto segregation in our country is one of the primary culprits in perpetuating hate and prejudice. When legal segregation ended, and schools were beginning to integrate, the white population responded by founding all-white private schools. People uprooted their families and moved further out into what became the suburbs. They could afford it. Black and Latino families couldn’t. These white families took with them their superior consumer buying power and their businesses. Job opportunities and tax dollars left these minority families and ensured that these low income slums became more desperate. Desperation breeds crime. Suddenly dads start going to jail, leaving single-parent households with less income. People sell drugs to get extra cash because the Quickie Mart doesn’t pay worth a shit, and so addiction rises. Prostitution becomes rampant, and then so do STDs. Without an adequate tax base, there is no money to properly staff and furnish schools. Thus begins the cycle.

Neighborhoods are now often segregated by race and ethnicity. They develop their own culture. People grow up with different states of mind and different values. In poor, minority neighborhoods, survival takes priority. These are people that have never seen education better a person’s life. They have never seen a school or a teacher who truly cares about their students. You have to do what you have to do to survive. That’s life. In the suburbs, kids are raised with relative privilege. Good schools, a path to college, a new cell phone for their birthday, and access to healthcare. Wealthy kids are raised with yet another set of conditions and values. With these values come attitudes about the world, about life, and about people outside of their own communities. One person might be raised in an all-white area and taught to view black people as lazy, ignorant, thieving, welfare leaches. He or she might be taught to call these people all kinds of horrible things. They tell racist jokes rife with stereotypes. They avoid black people in the supermarket. They avoid any unnecessary contact. Another person might be raised in an all-black neighborhood across town. The grandparents still remember the days of open racism. They remember the fire hoses and segregation. They remember being specifically targeted by outright racist police officers. They remember what people called them to their faces. They teach their kids, and their kids teach their kids. They teach that those white people across town don’t care about you. The cops don’t care about you, and will even target you over anyone else. No one will ever lift a finger for your well-being. YOUR LIFE DOESN’T MATTER. Sometimes they’re right. But that’s not the real problem.

The real problem is that people are indoctrinated without any way to challenge that upbringing. Segregation limits who you grow up around. It limits contact with people that are different from yourself. You grow up with stereotypes for other groups, and all it takes is even the occasional example of truth in them to confirm what you have always been taught. A person needs long-lasting exposure to people of different groups to undo the prejudice and hatred that is often learned from birth. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen it work. I’ve experienced this myself. I am one of those people. My mind has changed gradually over the years. The more people of diverse backgrounds I talk to and come to understand, the more clearly I see. The longer we segregate ourselves and shy away from diversity, the longer our problems persist. Look beyond your biases and your cultural indoctrination. People are people, and yes there are bad ones. But if we are to defeat the division and achieve unity—black, white, cop, civilian—we must cast aside all notions of us and them. Come to know your brothers and sisters. Spend time with people of differing backgrounds and viewpoints. Converse with people who disagree with you. Open your mind to someone else’s perspective. Start today. Please…hurry up.

A Dangerous Game We're Playing

Thousands roar in support and allegiance as they gaze up and across the crowded space at a spectacle of a stage at the head of the venue. It is a shrine of flags and symbols of propaganda. The audience chants and venerates the speaker at the podium as he addresses them with furious pride and smug rhetoric. He tells them their country will be great again. He tells them they will again be dominant. And to do this, society must be pure. It must be pure of those who would undermine its fabric with their lifestyle—a lifestyle so foreign to the values or the rest of the population that it should be done away with. Those people should be blocked. Their culture should be snuffed out. They are not to be trusted. They should be feared. They are less than us. I could easily be describing an old news reel from the late 1930s—one in German. But no, I’m describing a presidential candidate’s rally. And the political leader? Donald J. Trump.

Donald Trump has come out and full-on supported the notion that our country should block entry of all Muslims into the United States. For the record, I’m not opposed to tightening our borders out of caution, given that recent weeks have seen the execution of terrorist attacks outside of troubled Middle Eastern countries. We should scrutinize those applying for visas or attempting to enter the nation, particularly if they have recently visited ISIS or al-Qaeda-controlled areas of the globe. But barring all people based on a cultural common denominator is something we’ve worked against in the United States in the last several decades. Seventy-odd years ago, we were interning Japanese Americans in camps based on their heritage, and now we commonly recognize the folly in that kind of xenophobia. Fifty years ago, civil rights activists were staging sit-ins at restaurants that wouldn’t serve African Americans. We now see this practice as “un-American”. Or is it? Perhaps that’s perfectly American. Because while we can say, “sure, that’s an awful thing to refuse service to someone based on skin color”, aren’t we recently seeing people do this on the basis of sexual orientation? We have always been prone to discriminate against the minority. We have a very long history of assimilating out the cultural particulars of groups outside of the dominant norms. We make you speak English when you’re in our presence and tell us “Merry Christmas”, though you are a Jew.

So when Trump advocates the barring of everyone who practices a certain religion or when other elected officials publically suggest internment camps for Muslim Americans, it shouldn’t surprise us. That’s what Americans have always done. Just ask the Native Americans. But it is also an echo of a darker time in history when another leader and another society began a dangerous rhetoric about a religious group that they too had a problem with. Germany was already highly anti-Semitic by the rise of the Third Reich. Such anti-Semitism had its roots into the previous century. By the time Hitler was elected chancellor in 1933, he didn’t have to push much. Within a few years, strong public mistrust and opinion about Jews had turned to extreme discrimination that eventually saw Jews rounded up into ghettos and then on to camps. There, millions would be systematically exterminated. Am I saying that Trump, as a president, would ever round up Muslims and execute them in death camps? Not even close. This, I would hope, would never happen in today’s America. My point is that we are playing a dangerous game in terms of our legacy and especially for the Muslim Americans who work and live among us. One only needs to look to social media to see the hate and prejudice cultivating in certain US social circles. Memes and hateful overgeneralization feed that bias, and every time two radicalized Muslims carry out an act of violence, it confirms the existing view that none of them should be trusted. Like Nazi Germany, that prejudice exists. And all they needed was a leader to push forward that public opinion. And that’s all we need for Americans to take that next step into discrimination against Muslim Americans. All we need is that charismatic leader and his words that inflame. Let us instead reject the sins of our past in favor of a new America. Come on, folks. We’re smarter than this, right?