On Saturday night, I went to a friends birthday party. The party was at a club in Temple Hills, Maryland. Temple Hills is 85% African American. It took the bfriend and I three tries before we found a cab willing to take us there. (FYI – It is just outside DC and an easy 10 mile drive.) When we finally did find one, the cabbie spent the whole drive telling us what a dangerous place it was.
On Sunday, I attended A Continuing Talk on Race (A.C.T.O.R.) at Busboys and Poets. Ironically, this month’s guest was Rawn James, Jr. He was there to discuss his new book, Root and Branch: Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, and the Struggle to End Segregation. The group discussion centered around exactly the kind of de facto segregation in 85% black Temple Hills or 79% white Santa Cruz (where I lived the six years before moving to DC).
And on Sunday night, I listened to Womanist Musings on blog talk radio. The subject was bridging the divide between women of color and white feminists. Renee asked, as she has been asking for some time, how we can more effectively work together.
Divisions, and how to work across them, have been on my mind a lot lately. Two recent posts have been about collaborating across the divide and focusing issue by issue. But I think I may have gotten ahead of myself, because we are unlikely to work together successfully without first understanding one another. And in order to understand one another, we have to listen to each other. Too often, we aren’t even putting ourselves in the same room, much less having conversations.
I’m not talking just about racial divides. Political affiliation, economics, geography, religion, food, education, philosophy, music, clothes, cars, books, heroes, villains… We seem to have a nasty tendency to let small differences (and not so small differences) become impassible chasms. Sometimes the divides are rooted in prejudice and fear. Sometimes, like one participant on Sunday admitted, it is just the ease of being with people you know and understand.
We are all (to some degree) uninformed, misinformed, bigoted, suspicious, petty, defensive, and closed-minded. It may be easier to live in a neighborhood where everyone looks the same or to only get news from people who think like you. It’s easier to shut out the things that challenge or offend. It is easier to stay within your comfort zone than to risk exposing your ignorance or exposing yourself to other people’s ignorance.
But we can’t always just do what is easy. And insulating ourselves only ensures that we stay uninformed, misinformed, bigoted, suspicious, petty, defensive, and closed-minded.
To be clear, we all need safe spaces. We all need friends, family, and neighbors that we feel comfortable with. We need people who know us well enough to overlook a bad day or a stupid statement. We need places where we don’t have to navigate the daily minefields inherent in a society that is so separate and oppressive. And the more a person feels the weight of those minefields on a daily basis, the more they need that space.
But we also need safe spaces for crossing the divides, because those minefields will not disappear on their own.
So expose yourself to different people and different ways of thinking. If you are liberal, follow some conservative or libertarian blogs. If you are white, follow some black blogs. If you are a man, follow some women’s blogs. Don’t be a troll. Don’t read people just to find fault with them. Don’t look only for opportunities to debate. Look for opportunities to find common ground.
Get out there and make yourself uncomfortable. Talk to people that you don’t normally talk to. If you live in New York, spend time in Oklahoma. If you live in Minnesota, spend some time in Miami. If you’ve never left your country, do it now. And I don’t mean go stay in a resort where they make sure you are not exposed to anything even mildly jarring.
If you look, you will find other people who are willing to put themselves out there, even when it is uncomfortable. You will find people who will take the time to understand where other people are coming from and to explain where they are coming from. You will find people willing to be open and honest no matter what kind of abuse or ridicule they suffer for it. You will find people who create safe spaces, virtual and physical, that make the conversations possible.
Thank those people.
Cherish those people.
Be those people.
I strongly suspect that, if we focus on understanding each other, collaboration will follow.
