Justifying the Unjustifiable
This week was the 40th anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and it would be unthinkable to let this milestone go by without some recognition. At the same time, I constantly aim to challenge the universe of presuppositions that keep us locked into our bad old ways of thinking (there's nothing 'good old' about it). Columnist Richard Cohen in this morning's (Pulitzer Prize-winning) Washington Post wrote an article comparing and contrasting race in the current US presidential campaigns with the campaigns of John Kennedy and Michael Dukakis. We the people continue to insist on living in a dream world where our fantasies are more substantial than the physical universe. [If the truth were told, we'd have to admit that's not far from the facts.]
We continue to do what we've always done as human beings: we've created a conceptual framework and imposed it on the world and given it a meaning and a reality that it lacks. To put it bluntly, 'race' is an invented concept. It has no substance outside of our own imaginations. The fear and discomfort we experience around the subject of 'race' comes from our own personal demons and bogey-men. I remember reading a story when I was in high school about an immigrant family from India who stopped for a bite to eat at a fast food stand somewhere in the American South. They were told that black people had to go to the back door, but they complained that they were not African-American, but from India. Confused, the poor boy behind the counter decided to serve them at the side door.
The life strategy that we call 'comprehension' is all about taking a very strong, hard look at these artificial categories that we impose on the world and recognizing that they're simply convenient (or very inconvenient) 'tags' that we've imposed on ourselves or others. This behavior isn't just limited to the question of 'race'; it applies to nearly every category imaginable: ethnicity, religion, age, gender, sexual orientation, height, weight, and on and on. It's 'natural' to group certain observable characteristics together, but is it just? I remember seeing a very tall young man (about seven feet) walking through an airport some time ago. He was wearing a T-shirt that read, "No, Do You Play Miniature Golf"?
What's unjustifiable about classifying people (and everything else in the world) based on observable characteristics? There's no possible justification for allowing our judgments to be swayed by these artifices. Far too many people, (not the least of whom was Dr. King) have been sacrificed to these categorical prejudices. As Richard Cohen points out, the same mental forces are powerfully at play in current US politics (in both the campaigns and the flap over illegal immigration) as we've experienced for as long as human beings have been able to distinguish between 'us' and 'them'. Years ago, cartoonist Walt Kelly was so right when he wrote in one Pogo strip, "We have met the enemy, and they is us."
H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown
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