I'm asking you to reconsider your belligerent agitprop stance regarding inflamed racial/ethnic tensions in this country.
I've struggled with prejudicial attitudes in my adulthood, specifically my negative attitudes toward blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Muslims, and the LGBT scene. It always boiled down to negative personal experiences and cultural differences inciting the xenophobic instinct we all inherited from our brutal hard-scrabble evolutionary past. But I refused to let this base inclination sway me; on an individual basis, rationality and empathy always triumphed: I cracked jokes with my Latino co-workers, affably compared notes with black patrons at the jazz club I used to have coffee in, snorted coke with my Lebanese bosses, gossiped with the Korean convenience store owner about the latest episode of city hall ineptitude, and befriended a genderqueer couple who almost melted my brains in their dab bucket.
And, that's what it's really all about: acknowledging one's own fallibility, recognizing the darkness that lurks inside every human heart and refusing to grant it any further purchase. Just because I felt nervous walking down the street in an all-black neighborhood (which I've done when I was stationed at Ft. Gordon), that doesn't make me racist. Like I said, we're instinctively geared to see differences in others and to view them as a threat. Males of all stripe and color are also evolutionarily pre-programmed to be violent thieves and rapists, yet save for an appalling fraction of us we've ascended that base nature and instead flail like buffoons at courtship. The civilizing process is a painful climbing up the rungs of Jacob's Ladder, from out of the desert of being a survival machine to the Elysium of compassionate camaraderie and cooperation.
You're undoing this process by inflating passions with cultural yellow journalism. Now people who were once trying to get along have become antagonistic, no longer willing to work past their fears on an individual basis. The Zulu were rotten neighbors, as were the Aztec and the Han; colonial Europeans didn't think or act any differently than anyone else did, they just happened to be egregiously successful at it. Not only that, but it helps to remember who emigrated to this country up until recently: desperately impoverished and oppressed illiterate. Such people are easily manipulated into dehumanizing others; you see such barbarism on a much smaller and local scale on the streets of downtown Portland.
But, that's not what it means to be White, any more than scalping is what it means to be a Native or binding feet what it means to be Chinese. Revisionist history and racist propaganda work both ways: instead of perpetuating a neo-Thoreau set of myths sanctifying non-white people and demonizing the history and culture of whites of European descent, tell it like it really is — people are animals, and each and every successful culture, ethnic group, and [insert label of choice here] has committed xenophobic travesties of an opportunistic nature. But, we know better now, or rather we're learning better. In this modern era we can live, learn, love, and grow together; and while there will always be differences and disagreements, they don't need to dominate our dialog and drag us down into the depths of Phlegethon.
Unless, of course, that's what you want. Which I sincerely hope isn't the case; the Almost Good Enough of prejudiced people being polite to different-hued folk is surely superior to the vicious cycle of madness and fury we're caught up in now! Did the race riots of the '70s, the '20s, or that other '70s following the destruction of the Civil War engender any positive change, any understanding and healing? I'm no stranger to the catharsis of violence, but I'm also well acquainted with the indignity and injury of receiving it. The World, the Flesh, and the Devil was a curious post-apocalyptic film from the '50s, but I don't want to live it, nor do I think any of us deserve to.
In conclusion, I implore you to stop stirring the pot that is already boiling over. There comes a time when ratings and circulation numbers must give way to journalistic integrity, and that time is now — on the brink of too late. Be a reasoned and compassionate broker of peace. And maybe, just maybe, at the same time examine who is benefiting the most from this hot-blooded anomie.
