No Longer a Black and White World

I've been ruminating quite a bit about actor Michael Richards' recent rant, trying to find an appropriate context for both the intensity of the outburst and the sincerity of his apology. None of us likes to think of ourselves as harboring secret prejudice, and so generally we don't (think about it, that is), at least until we do (often because we can't avoid thinking about it any longer). So I guess on that level "Kramer" is no different than anyone else I know or know of. We all are, after all, only human.

The problem is not so much that human beings are instinctively xenophobic and suspicious of "the Other," or that we create stereotypes based on limited impressions, and then "discriminate" on the basis of those stereotypes in order to protect ourselves from the unknown threat of the unfamiliar, or even that we occasionally lose our tempers and say things we later wish we hadn't. That's just what people do.

The real question is whether or not we can find the courage to outgrow our prejudice, through better knowledge, broader personal experience, improved communication, sincere forgiveness, and ultimately real understanding. And the key to all of this is mutual trust, which (as we all know) doesn't exactly grow on trees. Yet Trust is also essential for forming the kind of honest and authentic interpersonal relationships we need to allow us to overcome our prejudices in the first place, and become better people than we are.

Intellectually, I've understood for a long time now that the whole idea of "race" itself is simply a social construction: a despicable fiction created to justify the "Peculiar Institution" of buying and selling one's own brothers and sisters as if they were chattal property. But Racism itself is very real, and deeply woven into almost every aspect of our social fabric and our cultural institutions. And so skin color becomes a "marker" of social class, our mutual ignorace of one another evolves into fear and suspicion, existing inequalities of wealth, power, and opportunity are reinforced, and the pervasive threat of violence which lurks just beneath the surface, both keeping everyone in "their place" and threatening to turn the entire unjust system inside-out, remains a constant part of the landscape of our everyday reality.

And I freely admit, I don't know what the answers are. If the answers were easy, this wouldn't still be a problem, would it? But the Good News is, when we finally do figure this all out, our shared wisdom will be a great benefit for us all. That's the day I'm praying I'll live to see. God willing, it won't be far away.