One on One
Beating racism, one person
at a time
Back in the late 1970s, I was a graduate student
at LSU. Every so often while I was there, there'd be an open speaker's
forum on the steps of the student union. The topics ran the gamut.
Why do the fraternities get all of the good seats at football
games? When will we get air dryers for our hands in the bathrooms?
Who says we can't fish in the campus lagoon? Politics, religion,
what have you.
And then there were the racial wackos who held forth on ideas
that pretty much had nothing to do with tolerance. I'd listen
for a few minutes to see if there was any chance that one of them
might have an epiphany and come to his senses but when this didn't
happen, "click," I turned them off and walked away.
If these loons wanted to occupy the outer fringes of racial beliefs,
so be it.
Neither did I want to waste my time arguing with them. That's
because of an old saying about wrestling with pigs which holds
that, in order to do so, one has to get down into the slop with
them and the pigs dearly love that slop.
Flash forward now to the current brouhaha over the Reverend Jeremiah
Wright - he of the belief that the government invented AIDS in
order to do away with the black race and several other equally
remarkable ideas. When I heard some of his comments, "click,"
I turned him off and went off to do other things. More on the
why of that in a few paragraphs but first, let's get some things
out of the way.
Are there racists in the United States? Yep, but that's true of
just about every country on earth.
Is any racial group pure as the driven snow? Not by a long shot.
If you look and listen closely, you'll find that racists come
in all flavors - black, white, red, yellow, and whatever else
might be out there.
Are we making any progress in this area? Well, it might be helpful
to note that just now there's a black man who has a solid shot
at becoming the President of the most powerful nation on earth
and that many millions of his supporters come in colors differing
from his, including white. Hard to ignore something like that
but possible if you wish to be obtuse.
So why do I think Reverend Wright might be about a full bubble
off as regards these matters? I remember a sermon once given by
our parish priest while I was in high school and New Orleans was
in the process of desegregating. The gist of the sermon was that
when the good Lord told us to "Love thy neighbor as thyself,"
he meant it. He didn't water that statement down with qualifiers,
modifiers, winks of the eye, or what have you. He didn't specify
age, ethnicity, background, or religion.
Our priest said that, to his mind, this bit of instruction was
also meant to be a one-on-one kind of thing. You looked at your
neighbors - whomever they might be - and you went to work at developing
a friendship. You lent them a hand when it was needed. You gave
them the benefit of the doubt. You trusted them. You got to know
them and, even if they were hard to warm up to, you learned to
respect them for whom they were. The neighbors, by the way, were
expected to do the same.
And from this behavior there would come tolerance for Joe or Bill
or Mary or whomever (unless they didn't return tools, at which
point all bets were off) and, sooner or later, you'd find yourself
- without even thinking about it - extending that same tolerance
to others who might look, act, dress, or speak like those neighbors.
If enough people did this, said our priest, there might actually
come a day when we'd get a handle on this race thing.
This still seems logical to me and that's why, whenever I hear
anyone (even someone with the title "Reverend" parked
in front of his name) going on about "whites this,"
"blacks that", "Asians the other," or "Hispanics
you wouldn't believe," (you can fill in religious backgrounds
there, too) then "click," I stop listening. That's because
the speaker - whatever race, color, or creed he or she might be
- has moved into the area of rants, nonsense, and bunk.
Sorry, but given all that's going on right now, we don't have
time for arguing about that kind of foolishness.
It'd basically be pig wrestling again.
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