03.06.07
Responsibility for Intolerance
This is a reflection on Act 1 of episode 322 in This American Life. You can stream the entire story from here (click on the little “volume” icon on the far left to stream the audio):
http://www.thislife.org/pages/descriptions/06/322.html
I heard part of it during pledge-drive weekend of KPCC (a southern california NPR member station), and it was very powerful. It touches on themes of religious / cultural intolerance, the cruelty of children, 9/11. It’s somewhat long, about 30 minutes, but I think (like most episodes of This American Life) the time is well worth it.
(you may want to actually take the time to listen to it in its entirety before reading the rest of this. spoilers ahead!)
This story stuck out in particular because of a recent conversation / debate I had about racism. It started out as a discussion of the intolerance some asian-american males had towards white guy / asian girl couples, and how this might be construed or even openly admitted to as a form of racism (see Racism == Gas ). The response was that, in fact, everyone is racist to some degree, which can be demonstrated by the difference between split-second decisions (the example of black guy walking into a korean-owned convenience store and threatening the owner was raised), and declarations of reasonable thought in a calm environment, such as on a blog or a discussion over lunch. (There is interesting research into this being done at Harvard’s Project Implicit.) In the context of the original argument, my friend was saying that while I might claim to not be racist to the extent of denouncing white men stealing our women-folk, deep down I had racist biases too, and I was “not that different” from the very people I was disagreeing with.
It’s a pretty big leap from interracial couples to anti-Islamic sentiment post 9/11, but bear with me here — in both cases, we as adults bear a greater responsibility in how we react to our own intolerance. Children are cruel, and seize upon the smallest differences — or create imagined differences — to ostracize and exclude. But hopefully they grow out of it. As adults maybe we carry the same seeds of intolerance; how many people found themselves much more capable of noticing Middle Eastern-looking people at airports after 9/11? But how we react to that makes all the difference. Do you feel uneasy then chide yourself for making unwarranted assumptions, or do you secretly hope that all noticeably Middle Eastern men get special screening “just to be safe”? Or do you go the extra mile and claim that in general, Muslims hate America?
The part of the story that affected me the most was the devastation that was visited on Chloe’s 4th grade life. I can’t imagine being that young and absolutely convinced I was all alone among my peers, who ostracized me with the authority and sanction of God Himself. Even the candy canes demonstrate the non-viability of my kind! And her parents are deeply affected too; you can hear it in her mother’s broken voice and the complete absence of her father’s (whose spirit was apparently broken by the ordeal and left for the peaceful existence of a Muslim in the West Bank — wait, what?).
Finally: were the children responsible? Of course not. We, as adults, are responsible for intolerance, because we have the ability to choose our words, and more often then not, our actions, even in the face of whatever subconscious biases we may hold. The fact that children take cues from adults places even greater importance on the care we give to how we deal with racism et al. On the one hand we can try to be reasonable when given the opportunity to think about it, on the other (admittedly extreme) hand we can be a stupid, degenerate disgrace to humanity.)