The taxi driver, a wiry White man in his 30s with a reddish beard, said he had the answer. He was driving to the airport in Asheville, NC. I was returning from the W.K.Kellogg’s Foundation’s 3rd America Healing conference and sharing the cab with another conference attendee I had just met.
The healing refers to racial healing. Apparently, Kellogg decided that it was better to brand their racial healing initiative without actually referring directly to “race”. Though my bias is usually to “say it like it is”, I think it was probably a smart decision. We did, however, talk about race during the conference – about the painful histories of different groups, about the current inequities in health, education, and incarceration rates, about media narratives, about affirmative action and other race-based public policies, about implicit bias that allows all of us to racially discriminate without even having the awareness that we’re doing so, about healing our own pain. It was a rich, stimulating few days of both learning and relationship-building.
The taxi driver had just asked us what the conference was about. “Racial healing,” my companion said, without getting into any of the above details but with what sounded to me to be a friendly, inclusive tone.
“I have the answer for that,” he volunteered.
We all have an answer, I thought, feeling a combination of curiosity about what he might propose, skepticism about the likelihood of him saying something interesting, and dread about the possibility of having to respond to a solution in opposition to my values.
“Blind Man’s Bluff,” he said before launching into a story from his youth when he took part in a regular “game” in which an equal number of guys and girls would line up facing each other on opposite sides of a room, the lights would be turned off, and everyone would move forward until they “found” a person of the opposite gender. He paused there, trusting that our imagination would be sufficient to fill in the rest.
“Blind Man’s Bluff,” he repeated, adding “when the lights are off, everyone’s the same.”
His tone was matter of fact, as if to say “isn’t this obvious—our shared humanity?”
Unfortunately, I think too often it is anything but obvious. Even today, in the supposed “post-racial” society that no one actually believes exists, we dehumanize each other in ways too many to list and sometimes too subtle to even notice.
When we find our organism becoming tense and agitated when approaching a group of young Black men on the street, we are no longer seeing them as fellow human beings but, at least partially, as objects of fear.
When we perceive immigration solely or even partially as a threat to our economic well-being, we are no longer seeing the full humanity of the immigrants, regardless of their status.
And yes, when we assume that the White stranger sitting next to us will fail to see our full humanity on the basis of our skin color, we are no longer seeing his.
The cab driver was right, of course. Underneath our skin, we are all human beings. We strive to find joy and friendship. We care about our kids and sometimes get exasperated by them. We feel disappointment when we don’t succeed and angry when we believe we were treated unjustly. We long for love and happiness.
When the lights are off, when our superficial differences are not directly in front of our eyes, it is possible to remember each other’s humanity or perhaps momentarily forget that we ever saw them any other way. I think this is what the taxi driver might have meant, or perhaps he was just remembering the physical sensation of skin on skin and lips on lips. I’d like to think that it was both. In any case, I agree: When it’s too dark to see difference, we all look the same.
The complication, of course, is that it’s not always too dark to see. And, in those moments, in the moment s of full light, when we can really see each other, we can’t pretend that we don’t see differences. That’s a fool’s errand and social science data actually show that White people who explicitly endorse a color-blind ideology (and this really is a mostly White phenomenon) show less multicultural awareness and knowledge (Neville, Spaniarman, & Doan, 2006) and more explicit and implicit racial bias than White people who do not (Richeson & Nussbaum, 2004).
Furthermore, not surprisingly, people of color tend to react unfavorably to professed color-blindness. For one, there is well-placed skepticism about the genuineness of (and motivation behind) such an orientation. For another, there is often, in these moments, the subjective experience of not being seen. This “game” of professing to not recognize that which is clearly visible is uniquely racial. We don’t tell children we don’t see their youth or men that we don’t see their gender. We used to tell people who self-identify as gay that they are not really gay, but sexual orientation is not literally visible, and even that narrative of denial has begun to shift of late. To be sure, here in the United States, we do tend to see certain Americans as not American, or at least not American enough, but that’s not so much because we do not see nationality as because we do see race.
As absurd as it feels to deny any other aspect of another person’s identity, we not only do it but it is so commonplace that in some racially homogeneous communities it can be hard to find a counter-example. Altogether, racial color-blindness is the dominant racial narrative in conservative media and may well be the dominant racial ideology for the majority of this generation’s young White people, many of whom have been taught by their often well-intentioned parents and teachers that to see race is to be racist and that racial colorblindness is the only path to racial justice.
During the America Healing conference, Valerie Davidson, Senior Director of Legal & Intergovernmental Affairs at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC), urged those in attendance to “lead with love.” I can’t agree more, but there are many types of love, and it’s important to me to be precise. I want us to lead, to work, to live with a very specific kind of love, the kind that connects us at eye-level. I want us to engage with each other, to help each other, and to love each other, as equals --like friends -- rather than paternalistically, like we love a child, or with idealization, like we love God, which is not to suggest that we should not strive to see the divine in each other.
This kind of love requires us to see, to really see each other’s full humanity – the vulnerabilities as well as the strengths, the pain as well as the beauty, the things that make us different and unique, as well as those that we have in common. It requires such seeing because if we are unable or unwilling to see each other in this kind of depth and fullness, then we might feel sympathy or admiration but not love.
Love requires wholeness. We can love only the whole person, not some fragmented part that we happen to be willing to both recognize and embrace.
As well, we have to find ways to love our whole selves, because if we are unwilling to acknowledge our own dark sides and recognize and embrace all aspects of our own being, how can we possibly hope to do so with another?
None of this is a criticism of the taxi driver. We arrived at the airport not long after he finished his story, and there was no opportunity to continue our dialogue. I don't know that he didn't have an equally compelling story about the light, but it is nevertheless interesting that he chose to focus on the dark. It's time, I think, for us to figuratively move away (and beyond) that particular kind of love. Perhaps W.K. Kellogg's America Healing initiative will push us in that direction. Regardless, it's our responsibility to push each other.