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.

Apathy and the Common American: Why I Dislike Americans

I’ve come to the conclusion that I really kind of dislike Americans. Before you start chastising my lack of patriotism and telling me to “not let the door hit me in the ass on my way out”, let me explain what I mean. I don’t hate America in the slightest. I don’t hate being an American. I totally appreciate what I have here. I have a good life. But that’s just my point. I appreciate what I have. I hear people say that a lot. They claim to have a deep appreciation for the life they have in the United States; all the freedoms, rights, and opportunities afforded to most (yeah, not all) people born here. But I’m not sure they have the full picture of what that means. Sure, people generally understand that there are places in the world plagued by warlords and malaria. All you have to do is stay up late enough for early morning crap TV to see the commercial asking you for fifty cents a day. You understand there are hungry children in the world. It’s a general awareness that never seems to permeate the hard outer shell of spoiled entitlement and apathy for the less fortunate. It’s an afterthought. It happens waaaay over there. Can’t be bothered by it. And in the next thought, I can’t believe they give me the choice to press 8 for Spanish when I call my bank! What’s this country coming to?!

Let me begin with my recent adventures in London. This was a unique opportunity to visit a contemporary country with a comparable economy and culture. I also found it to be an opportunity to interact with non-Americans. I was curious to see what they really think of us. Answer? Maybe you don’t want to know. I have long been of the impression that a lot of the world community sees us as overfed, undereducated, gun-toting maniacs. But that seemed a little harsh. Maybe it isn’t that bad, right? But the more I talked to Londoners and they caught on that I an American, I began to realize that I was a walking stereotype. Several times a day, usually over a nice pub ale, I had the same conversations. A: How in the hell could we entertain the idea of a Trump presidency (yes, they keep up)? B: What’s the deal with all of the murders, shootings, and open carry laws? Every day. And that’s a tougher conversation than you think as you look around the city and see that even the cops don’t carry guns.

But it wasn’t the interaction with Londoners that put me off—it was my encounters with Americans while I was there. I’m not lying when I say that every single one that I happened upon overseas was the “ugly American” you always hear about. The one that perpetuates the stereotypes. They’re ignorant, yes, but not in a way that you genuinely don’t know and would like to be corrected so that you might be enlightened. No. Nooooo. This is the type of ignorance that’s loud and unapologetic. I’M TOTALLY IGNORANT AND I DON’T GIVE A SHIT BECAUSE I’M AMERICAN AND I’M BETTER THAN YOU!! Every. Last. One. Example:  On my way out of a pub, I hear one of my countrymen ask the guy next to him, “Hey, are you English?” I’m thinking, In London? What are the odds? As it turned out, he was not, indeed, English. He replied, “No, I’m Irish”. The American then said, “Oh. Same difference, right?” I walked out of the pub with a face-palm. It was like that friend or family member you have that you love dearly but you’re embarrassed to go into public with. And the guy boisterously lecturing a pub crowd over the fine attributes and foreign policy prowess of Donald Trump. And as I sat in another pub watching London news TV, which covered mainly local politics and the fact that it was going to rain every day for the foreseeable future, I took a hefty, somber gulp of ale with the news that in my 5 day stay in England there had been three mass shootings in the US, and most of you didn’t notice because it doesn’t even make the news anymore.

But what really solidifies my new dislike for Americans comes from a recent cruise vacation to the Caribbean with my family. It was a lovely trip of course, and as always, I love to interact with the wonderful people of Montego Bay and Grand Cayman. The ports of call were not the problem. It was what I saw on the ship that turned my stomach. Every passenger on that boat was at least middle class. They likely live a relatively comfortable life. That’s not to say they’re necessarily rich, but as I have come to find out, you don’t have to be rich to be oblivious to your own sense of entitlement. To preface, if you’ve never been on a cruise ship, you should know that they are staffed almost completely with international employees. Only a few are American or British, and one hundred percent of the time, those workers are the director of something and get payed far more than anyone else. You begin to detect a pattern when you see nationality printed on the employees’ name tags. Cruise lines hire heavily from countries like Zimbabwe, the Philippines, Indonesia, Bulgaria, and India. These are places where malaria and starvation are common, or the economy is thirty years behind the rest of the world. You hardly ever see French, German, or Swedish employees. Nope. The ones from India will work for less. And most of these employees send every bit of their pay home to their families that they get to see a total of about two months out of the year. But hey, they made sacrifices and that’s what they had to do to provide for their families. More power to them.

Still, to compare that to the passengers allowed me to finally realize how ugly we can be as a people; as a culture. From time to time, when we cruise, we will sit down at a poker table which is the way to go if you insist on gambling. You can play a lot longer and for a lot less money than pouring your bankroll into a slot machine. And it’s a great way to chat with other people from other places in the US. You can be there for hours on the same buy-in. Sometimes, as you get to know these people, you can quickly see that you don’t like them. Others, obviously, are pretty nice. And all of them…were highly entitled. To listen to these people bitch and what they bitched about was so petty. [in my whiny, spoiled voice] The soup was so bland tonight. Oh yeah? Well my steak was between medium and medium well, when I clearly asked for medium. And my stateroom wasn’t turned down the way I like it. My kids were expecting towel animals and they didn’t get one tonight. The chocolate extravaganza at the buffet was a joke! And I look at this girl dealing cards—the one from a country where 1.6 million people have AIDS, there are over 500,000 orphans due to AIDS, and there is massive starvation—and I lock eyes with her. I could see it. She didn’t say a word, but I knew what she was thinking. Poor you. You have it so tough here in the US. That’s when I really began to dislike these people. And that’s when I realized this attitude accounts for most of our population. Maybe it isn’t conscious or by choice. But that’s the nature of ignorance. And you have a choice not to be.

The cherry on top was the buffet and dining rooms. To watch people pile food onto a plate at the buffet and eat half of it is a common sight even if you’re not on a cruise ship. Where it really hit me was to see people in the dining room at literally every table order three appetizers and two main courses(for one person). If you’re a big eater, fine. If you ate it, fine. What sickened me was to watch that waiter from the Philippines or Indonesia have to come by, pick up a plate with one bite taken out of it, and dump it all in the trash, knowing that in the Philippines, one in seven people are starving. I saw it in their faces. Most people didn’t. Maybe they weren’t paying attention. Maybe they didn’t want to or didn’t care. But again, it’s this hardened shell we have round us that is impervious to the plight of others in the world. And with this comes a lack of empathy, even when it comes to similar problems within our own borders.

Here’s my conclusion. I currently dislike Americans. That doesn’t mean I dislike America. I love my country. I just have a problem with our culture of apathy and entitlement. And I’m not talking about the word entitlement as someone complains about poor people on welfare. I’m talking about the since of entitlement possessed by that person bitching about welfare recipients. Because those are the same people complaining that their steak is overdone or that housekeeping was too slow to bring them a third pillow. You have a good life. Enjoy it. No one is saying you have to be ashamed of having things. I, too, enjoy the finer things in life. I just wish Americans had a deeper appreciation for those things they have and more than just a passing awareness of the kind of suffering experienced by others in the world. Your bland soup is not suffering, nor is it suffering when McDonald’s forgets to hold the pickles. So please Americans…make me like you again. Make the world like you again.