Must Someone Look Just Like You?

I heard a woman telling a friend she didn't know much about those running for school board positions in the coming election. In response, the friend said, "Just vote for the women." Such advice rings sort of hollow at a time when DNA research finds, unless DNA shows someone is an intergalactic alien with six arms, less than one percent of a person's DNA makes him or her different from everyone else. We might as well vote for anyone.

     Nkechi Okoro Carroll, a black female TV writer and showrunner at the CW network, reminded TV studios they cannot expect one African American to convey the perspective of all blacks. She herself grew up in Nigeria and the Ivory Coast and attended an English boarding school. She knows nothing about the hood.

     When I was growing up in Chicago, I asked my mother why there were no black sales clerks at Marshall Fields. She said the store didn't think white customers would buy anything from people who didn't look like them. For a long time, the same thinking, or lack thereof, prevented older, white managers from hiring young, professional women to sell the advertising, copiers, pharmaceuticals, insurance, and everything else they sell today.

     The point is, you can't tell a book by its cover and you can't tell those who have something valuable to share by the color of their skin. Stereotypes make it easy to assume we have nothing in common with teachers, characters in books, police officers, politicians, and anyone else who doesn't look like us and we have everything in common with those who look the same as us. Reality suggests more careful discernment pays off when it comes to human relationships.
 
   

A New Start

As 2019 approaches, it's time for a new start. An African-American panelist discussing race relations in America observed the Civil Rights Movement offered a more promising starting point from which to consider future race relations than the era of slavery. Nelson Mandela emerged from apartheid and 28 years in prison in South Africa with the same idea. Basically, he asked, what is gained by doing the same thing to whites as they did to blacks, when blacks are in power?

     When blacks gained power in neighboring Zimbabwe, the government ignored Mandela's advice, seized white farms, plunged the country's economy into a rapid decline, and left the population dependent on food aid to avoid starvation.

     The point is, at the beginning of 2019, we are free to choose where we want to begin. There are some great starting points: the 10 Commandments, the U.S. Declaration of Independence's declaration that all men are created equal, and the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Beginning 2019 with this 70-year-old declaration in mind, countries could avoid pre-World War II conditions: genocide, refugee migrations, Middle East conflict, abortion, proliferation of weapons, human trafficking, squandering natural resources, and polluting the environment.

     Happy New Year!
   

How to React When You've Been Wronged

Colombia's new President, Ivan Duque, will come to office facing a population that suffered hundreds of thousands killed by rebels who now are allowed to hold public office under the terms of a 2016 peace accord. Instead, many of his wronged constituents want retribution for crimes against their families.

     In The Monarchy of Fear, Martha C. Nussbaum writes about Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the valid anger he faced as a leader of once-enslaved African-Americas in the United States. She also sees anger growing among those whose standard of living is threatened by automation and outsourcing of jobs, while others thrive from globalization.

     When President Obama was asked to deliver the Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture in South Africa this year, he too reflected on the way globalization and technology can benefit the rich and powerful while facilitating inequality. But he reminded his audience about how Mandela responded: 1) to his over 20 years of captivity under an apartheid structure that defined the artificial domination of whites over blacks by studying the thinking of his enemies, and 2) to his election as President of South Africa by abiding by the constitutional limit of his presidential term and by not favoring any group.

     Obama acknowledged, IT IS HARD to engage with people who look different and hold different views from you. But you have to keep teaching that idea of engaging with different people to ourselves and our children, he said.

     Each of us has to hold hard, as Nelson Mandela did, even while he was in prison, to the firm belief that being a human entitles each of us to a human inheritance. All people are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, Obama reminded his South African audience. What flows from that firm belief in the equality of rich and poor, woman and man, young and old, and every other human difference is Mandela's conclusion: "It's not justice if now you're on top, so I'm going to do the same thing that those folks were doing to me, and now I'm going to do it to you."

     Nussbaum expresses the same idea. Saying something is wrong and should never happen again is valuable, but deciding to fix it by making the doer suffer is not helpful. Put another way, an African-American, speaking on a panel at a forum, observed it is more productive to go forward with an attitude based on the Civil Rights movement than an attitude derived from slavery.

     Once you concentrate on your own value as a human being and that of all other humans and vow not to repeat past failures, there's hope for a better future.

   

   

   

You Have To Be Carefully Taught

If a child has never met a blind student from Peru, a Muslim actor, or a rich Chinese businessman, how will he or she feel about these people? In the musical, South Pacific, the U.S. soldier who begins to fall in love with an island girl he meets during World War II sings "You have to be carefully taught."

     Lucky children like Meghan Markle might have a black and a white parent, and a young President Obama even had a mother from the United States and a father from Kenya, got to spend early years in Indonesia, and grew to a young man in the diverse cultures of Hawaii. Lucky kids might get to know Hispanic, black, and white kids while playing basketball together on a neighborhood court. Korean and Italian kids could meet singing together in a church choir. And before a teen in a wheelchair and the school's aspiring ballerina publish their first comic book, they might have worked together on the school's newspaper.

     All sorts of robotic, marketing, math, trivia, and forensic competitions bring together kids with different backgrounds and genders. Yet, news events constantly show the danger of relying on luck to form children into adults who acknowledge the similarities and respect the differences of others. The fact is, children have adult mentors who influence them to think about people in ways that help or harm the world.

     In the United States, children are about to honor their Mothers on Mother's Day this weekend and their Fathers on Father's Day next month. Around the world, mothers and fathers should be honored, because they are in a powerful position. They can pass on their prejudices or open young minds.

     When trendwatching.com reports the Mexican startup company Sign'n, uses software to employ artificial intelligence that translates speech into Mexican sign language, we suspect someone nurtured a young inventor's concern for those marginalized because of their hearing disability. Likewise, visually-impaired  Brazilians employed to use their enhanced smell and taste senses as beer sommeliers have someone to thank for helping a young person learn to consider and remedy the needs of others.

     A Muslim friend recently introduced me to a book, Crescent Moons and Pointed Minarets, that uses rhymes and English translations of Arabic to present various shapes and to convey Islamic traditions and terms. At the end of the book, a Glossary provides definitions of the Arabic words used and a phonetic guide to their pronunciations.
     As an example of the way the book's author, Hena Khan, and artist, Mehrdokht Amini, combine words and art, picture how, under an arch embellished with complex borders and patterns of flowers and vines that resemble those in Persian rugs. readers learn:

Arch is the mihrab

that guides our way.

We stand and face it

each time we pray.

In contrast to picturing Muslims as over a billion religious people known for the early contributions of their mathematicians and astronomers, today's news reports Boko Haram added to its Nigerian terrorist kidnappings and killings by bombing a mosque and market. And Islamic fighters in Iraq commit genocide and sell Yazidi women and girls into slavery or hold them as sex slaves. Somehow these Muslims have not been carefully taught right from wrong. 

     Regimes, like those in Iran, China, and Russia, seem oppressive because they censure the broadcast and social media they allow their populations to see. But aren't we doing much the same thing, when algorithms select the books we read, the films we watch, and the news and ads we see, or when we self-censure by only watching the cable news stations that agree with us? Teaching ourselves and our children to keep open minds takes work, work both needed and worth doing...very carefully.