The Only Cure For Racism (long)

[hmkpoker]

I thought I'd share a story with you guys about something pretty significant that happened to me recently.

First a quick background. I'm a white guy. I was born to an upper middle class white family in a white neighborhood. I went to a very white elementary school, and a very white high school. In college nearly everyone in my dorm and on my campus was white. Most of my classes were white and all my friends were white. In every job I've ever had, all my coworkers and bosses were white. Nearly every person with whom I've had a meaningful relationship in my entire life was white. I don't think I've ever had a black friend, or ever really gotten particularly close to a black person.

Now don't worry, I was plenty educated. I've had many years of classes telling me that blacks and whites are equal. That discrimination is wrong. That horrible atrocities have been committed against blacks for centuries, and that we need to overcome them to have peace in our civilized society. That anything a white person can do a black person too is capable of. That blacks have made phenomenal contributions to society in the forms of art, politics and market innovations. Every February I've either taken a class or gone to some demonstration about black history. I know, as a rote intellectual fact, that whites and blacks are "equal" (whatever that means).

But I've never really believed that last part.

Statistics tell quite a different story. It's been demonstrated that blacks, for whatever reason, are on average as much a whole standard deviation behind whites in IQ. They are more prone to violent crime, and more likely to have come from a socially disadvantaged family. It is human nature to feel comfortable around the familiar and defensive around the unfamiliar (for obvious evolutionary reasons). Given all these premises, I cannot see it as anything less than rational for me to defensively guard my wallet or lock my door when I am in a black neighborhood. They look different and they tend to act different. And most sources of information that I have suggest that blacks tend to dislike whites, and for very good reason. For all the tolerance training I've recieved, there simply has been no reason for me to not to feel more defensive around black people.

Did this make me a racist? Maybe a little. As much as I know intellectually that black people are just as human as whites, it's impossible for me to ignored the cold, hard, indisputably obvious fact that they are different. It is inevitable that humans will display preference among differences, and while I'd never advocate something horrible like discrimination, I can't help but prefer one to the other on some subtle, subconscious level, and I think this is a LOT more common than we would like to admit.

Now fast forward to a few days ago (MLK day, of all days). I was driving fast down I-95 when suddenly a car cut in front of me. I swerved and started to skid. My car swung out of control and plunged head-first into the nearby enbankment, totalling the car. I blacked out for a few seconds.

The first thing I remember when I came to was two black guys helping me force open the front door and help me out. They called 911 for me and helped calm me down, since I was panicking, and made sure that I wasn't hurt (which, thankfully, I wasn't). When they saw that I was ok and that the police were on the way, they were back on their way.

You have no idea what this did to the subjective impressions of black people in my mind. These guys went out of their way to make sure I, a perfect stranger, was all right. I don't think I, in all my selfishness, would have done that for another person. I cannot help but think that this has permanently improved my attitude toward black people for the better.

We think in associations. When something happens we automatically associate it with whatever other phenomena is judged to be the most proximate. This is the basic rule of all human learning. A man who gets sick on his first trip to a sushi bar may forever avoid Japanese food. Someone who has great sex for the first time with someone he loves while listening to a certain song in the background will forever love that song as well. If a person is violently aggressed against by a black, hispanic, asian or whatever, that person will instinctively move toward hatred and fear toward not only that person, but toward that with which the person is identified (which happens, of course, to be race). And when someone is helped in a time of need, the same rules apply.

A simple three minute act of kindness accomplished what months of liberal propaganda and tolerance training could not.

We do not learn about our fellow man through books or numbers; we learn about them through interaction. No matter how much social theory you teach someone about tolerance, if their interactions with another group are bad, they are going to move toward hatred. That's part of what being human is.

The government cannot legislate how to feel. No tolerance education can ever substitute for real interaction. No law that is passed will ever make an otherwise bigotted redneck suddenly want to hold hands with people of all races and creeds under a rainbow. Give black people our job opportunities, and all we whites will ever see when we look at a black man behind a desk is the four or five more qualified white people that lost their job to a n****r.

The responsibility of curing racism lies not with the lawmakers, but with the individual representatives of that race. Every one of us represents our race to others. Only individual good deeds can end racism.