Within a recent, two-day period, Indianapolis media reported on two separate, ugly incidents. In Greenwood, racist flyers were distributed on cars parked at the Greenwood Park Mall; in Carmel, anti-Semitic tracts were thrown on driveways in selected neighborhoods.
Within a recent, two-day period, Indianapolis media reported on two separate, ugly incidents. In Greenwood, racist flyers were distributed on cars parked at the Greenwood Park Mall; in Carmel, anti-Semitic tracts were thrown on driveways in selected neighborhoods.
A shopper at the Greenwood Mall, interviewed in one radio report, summed it up. "I really thought we had gotten over this sort of thing in Greenwood," she lamented.
We haven’t. Not in Greenwood, not in Carmel, not in Indianapolis.
It is so tempting for people of good will to believe that the sentiments displayed in such episodes are aberrant, that such venom no longer receives even tacit social support. We want to believe that we’ve come a long way from the "restricted" subdivisions, segregated facilities and "gentlemen’s agreements" that characterized the 1950’s and 60’s. And in many ways, we have. We have repealed the Jim Crow laws that lent a veneer of respectability to notions of racial or religious superiority. Nice people no longer use the "n" word, or tell cutting jokes about Bernstein with the big nose. Other nice people engage in efforts at racial and religious reconciliation, through our churches and synagogues and civic organizations.
If we are white, we try not to notice that Sunday morning is still the most segregated time of the week, as we pray in our respective (black and white) churches. We rarely mention our city’s still-pronounced residential segregation. We wince when Indianapolis police engage in a "brawl" characterized by racial slurs and gross sexist insults, or when Carmel police decide that driving through Carmel while black is sufficient cause for citation. We insist that white flight is an escape from the school system rather than the color of its students.
Minorities are not exempt from this game. Many blacks who should know better excuse the anti-Semitic and anti-White rhetoric of a Farrakhan or Khalil Mohammed. Many Jews who have experienced discrimination are willing to engage in it. And then we are all shocked and appalled when raw bigotry appears on our windshields or in our driveways.
As upsetting and distasteful as these episodes are, however, they serve a purpose. They remind us that the work of making a human family is only just begun.
As biological science has advanced, it has debunked the myth of racial identity. We now know that there are fewer genetic variations between members of supposedly different races than there are within each ‘racial’ group. We may come in different colors, sizes and shapes, we may have different cultures, habits and beliefs, but we are all one race. The human race.
Most of us mentally distance ourselves from the kind of people who distribute racist diatribes. But before we absolve ourselves of all complicity, perhaps we should take an honest inventory of the more civilized, genteel behaviors that — ever so subtly — encourage the notion that some portions of our human family are inferior to others.