RACIAL INTEGRATION WORKS

Condoleezza Rice asked the most intriguing question on this 50th anniversary of the Birmingham Church bombing, “How could people hate us so much?” The explosion killed four young black girls and wounded 22 others. Lee Harvey Oswald added an exclamation point to the incident 2 months later when he shot and killed John F. Kennedy, our president. I don’t know of anyone else who connects these two incidents in this way, but in my mind they are both expression of racial hatred. Years later, while living in Belize, I met a Texan who made this remarkable statement, “The school children stood on their desks and cheered when they heard that JFK had been shot.”  I have no way of knowing if what he said was true or not but he made the point, it was not just Lee Harvey Oswald, a fellow of low mentality following what he felt was his instincts or maybe he felt he was doing what his fellow Texans wanted. It was deeper than that.

Condoleezza Rice is a high-ranking political scientist and diplomat: she is intelligent and highly educated but still did not have the answer to that simple question.  People do things for the rewards involved sometimes the rewards are material while other times not so much. The point being that they have a reason for doing what they do. Therefore, the Condoleezza Rice question should have been what did the church bombers expect to gain? What did the cheering school children see in the murder of a president that gave them cause to celebrate?

People do not want to believe it, but racism is in our genes in the form of xenophobia. To some people, saying it is in their genes means we cannot change.  In modern society, racism is irrational fear but 150,000 years ago, it was not. It was instinctual; it was subconscious. Even today, psychologists’ have shown that many if not most of us who claim not be racist have subconscious fear of people who are different. Look at modern politics, candidates openly campaign on hate “Muslims”, or hate immigrants, or hate black people, although clever politicians often use coded language to make their point in the case of race. Ronald Reagan declaring he will run for a second term as president in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the town where the residents murdered civil rights workers.

To answer the Rice question, compare racism to fear or phobia of heights (acrophobia). Even beasts know they can fall and be hurt although I suspect they do not know or appreciate what death means they know what pain is. The way to avoid danger is to avoid heights. The way to avoid danger from immigrants is not to allow immigration: Latino, Irish, Haitians, or Muslims, for example. If successful, that would have been total segregation. However, in the Untied States, and most of the rest of the world, we have a mixed population. The separate but equal solution, apartheid, has been a proven failure. A mixed society is as if you layered cream on top of a cup of coffee and stirred clock-wise one hundred times, then try to recover or “re-segregate” the layer of cream by stirring one hundred times counter-clock wise.

Another solution, perhaps the one we saw attempted in Birmingham and in Dallas, and in fact a solution we see people striving for across the entire nation is and attempt to “restore” subjugation. My word ‘restore’ is in reference to our plantation south history. Obviously, subjugation is not working nor can it ever work—again. Those with this mindset will never achieve their diabolic aim because it has no biologically foundation. Scientists tell us that 50,000 to 60,000 years ago about 150 people squeezed out of Africa and eventually populated the entire world. In essences, this means the human race, as we know it squeezed through a genetic knothole. Therefore, the genetic history of all human beings is essentially identical, which obviously means race is superficial at best. What we are reacting to is different identity; we are scared of a person we do not know only because we do not know them.  How do we know that we do not know them? We look at their faces or their hijab and do not recognize them; they are strangers!

Condoleezza Rice, the answer to your question is not simple but is different for different people. After seeing you on TV hundreds of times, I feel I know you. However, I do not like you, perhaps not to the level of hate, because you are one of the Republicans who got us into the war in Iraq. Every time I turn on my TV, or go shopping, or any of a thousand of other interactions I have every day I am getting to know more people. Skin color is an identifier just like hair colors, facial features, and physical heights are identifiers. It will just take a lot of time and heartache for everyone to learn this. What Martin Luther King saw and Malcolm X did not, was that integration works—but not overnight. As an aside, religious integration has a longer road to go than racial integration has—we are still fighting wars over religion.

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