Racism: Homogeny vs. Celebrated Variety
Last post I covered my belief that seeing “race” was a natural product of human nature. That we are built to see differences in each other, even if those differences are immaterial. I summarized that seeing these differences does not constitute racism. Instead, it is the strength of the prejudices we assign to our natural categorization that makes “seeing race” into “racism”. In this article, I want to discuss this second side of the racism coin… if seeing race is inevitable, how do we keep our prejudices appropriate?
The other day my wife and I were watching Oprah. The show was about different mothers around the world. Several times over the course of the show Oprah mentioned how similiar the needs of these exotic women were to the needs of American women. While I understand that Oprah’s intentions were to create empathy for these women, I find the tactic of emphasizing similarities between people overly simplistic. Oprah’s emphasis on similarities implies that she believes the reason we have prejudices is because we fail to see our similarities.
Oprah presents the similarities as if they were new ideas. Her challenge to find compassion correctly requires us to look past our differences, but it fails to address how the underlying intolerance of differences had blinded us to compassion in the first place. Asking us to be compassionate requires that we are first tolerant. Trying to teach compassion without tolerance is putting the cart before the horse.
As Oprah’s show went on, she had a guest who was an Eskimo. Oprah was offered some native Eskimo food, and with wrinkled nose Oprah turned it away… promising to eat it only off air. Oprah was willing to empathize with these women only so long as she didn’t have to accept their way of life. As long as she could turn a blind eye to the differences, she was empathetic. When confronted with something new in such a way that she was forced to deal with it, her response was rejection.
Oprah’s rejection of the whale meat wasn’t physical. She doesn’t have a physical allergy to the meat. Instead her rejection was mental. She found the prospect of eating whale revolting because mentally she was not prepared to accept it as a healthy, viable, nutrious alternative to her way of eating. If Oprah was presented whale meat and told it was processed green beans, she would have been eable to eat it with no ill effects.
I conjecture that if Oprah would have been able to eat the whale meat without any reservation, the Eskimo woman’s story wouldn’t have been very interesting. Her struggle to accept that a person lived in a such a cold place, with such a (necessarily) different diet, was indiciative of her difficulty to welcome differences in lifestyle. This stuggle to accept the various lifestyles of women around the world, while being empathetic to those women, provided the conflict that moved the episode. Without this struggle, that Oprah show would not be very interesting.
While Oprah was ostensibly encouraging empathy, she was also reinforcing the idea that her lifestyle is the most desirable and acceptable. She was encouraging us to feel empathy for the other mothers, but at the same time pointing at them and saying, “can you believe how bad the lives of these people are compared to our rightous and glorious selves?”
I don’t believe we have a problem empathizing with people who have different lifestyles. I believe we can see similarities when we want. However, it is our intolerance that dissinterests us to finding similarities. The real key to finding empathy is to be more accepting of variety. If we were not so preoccupied with dissaproving of how another person was living, then our common ground would be much more obvious.
This is why I get frustrated with the “harmony argument” that encourages us to see similarities instead of the differences. The fact is we are built to see differences, and we are built to stereotype. Instead of encouraging everyone to feel homoginized, we should instead celebrate the fact that we are different. We should be open to different lifestyles, and curious about them. If we were receptive to other ways of being it would release us from our skepticism, and we would find empathy much more easily.
Fostering homogeny gives us the idea that “to be alike is good”. But being alike is not good, and being unwilling to constructively consider alternative ways to live is even worse. History if full of examples where societies prospered because they were receptive to new ideas… but that will have to be a topic for a future blog.
I believe the path to racial harmony is not to feel that we are all the same, instead it’s to feel comfortable celebrating the fact that we are all different. We will always look at each other and see differences, but it is our attitude toward differences that will allow us to be receptive, empathetic, and improved by these differences. If we can look at our differences without feeling threatened, if we start with trust rather than skepticism, if we are open to giving our own lifestyles reconsideration when presented with new options - then we will be free of bigotry.