This Land Is Your Land
How the Greatest Sociological Shift in United States History is Changing Everything. And What that Change Requires of Us. (Or, How Each of Us Shapes the Fate of All of Us.)
RD Moore, SeaChange Press
I. The Three Ages (Or, Beginning of the End) - 10 Chapters
II. The Five Stages (Or, What a Fool Believes) - 10 Chapters
III. The Four Actions (Or, If You're Out There) - 10 Chapters
- PREVIEW -
This Land Is Your Land
By Woody Guthrie – 1944
As I was walking that ribbon of highway; I saw above me that endless skyway.
I saw below me that golden valley; this land was made for you and me.
Nobody living, can ever stop me, as I go walking that freedom highway.
Nobody living, can ever make me turn back; this land was made for you and me.
“I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling. … I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself.” – Woody Guthrie
The Times They Are A-Changin'
By Bob Dylan – 1964
Come gather 'round people, wherever you roam, and admit that the waters around you have grown; and accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you is worth savin', then you better start swimmin', or you'll sink like a stone; for the times they are a-changin'.
The line it is drawn, the curse it is cast. The slow one now will later be fast, as the present now will later be past.
The order is rapidly fadin', and the first one now will later be last; for the times they are a-changin'.
By Woody Guthrie – 1944
As I was walking that ribbon of highway; I saw above me that endless skyway.
I saw below me that golden valley; this land was made for you and me.
Nobody living, can ever stop me, as I go walking that freedom highway.
Nobody living, can ever make me turn back; this land was made for you and me.
“I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling. … I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself.” – Woody Guthrie
The Times They Are A-Changin'
By Bob Dylan – 1964
Come gather 'round people, wherever you roam, and admit that the waters around you have grown; and accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you is worth savin', then you better start swimmin', or you'll sink like a stone; for the times they are a-changin'.
The line it is drawn, the curse it is cast. The slow one now will later be fast, as the present now will later be past.
The order is rapidly fadin', and the first one now will later be last; for the times they are a-changin'.
Preface (expand)
Some might ask, “What, in particular, qualifies you to write a book of this nature?” And likewise, I could try presenting myself as some kind of renowned authority; citing all manner of credentials that might or might not be relevant, or even meaningful. But that’s neither helpful nor entirely honest. In reality, I’m no more of an expert on the whole of the American story than anyone else who has lived their small piece of its history.
At the same time, however, there’s a perspective that’s unique to me, just as there’s one that’s unique to you, a version of our shared story that only you can tell; one grounded in the person you are, the life you’ve lived, the context that shaped you, the choices you’ve made, and the social vantage point you have, in other words, that which makes you, you.
Just as the act of observing something changes it, all of society is shaped simply by us having been a part of it. At every juncture, there are contributions that only you can make, insights into us as a people that only someone who has lived your life can have. Today, given the challenges facing us, we need what you bring more than ever. I believe the same holds true for me and the life I’ve lived.
My own journey began in Birmingham, Alabama; sandwiched between the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. I was born and grew up in a time and place that was at the epicenter of the Civil Rights movement, and ground zero for our nation’s collective wrestling with race and all that it had wrought.
It was a time of intense turmoil; a period after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which devastated our nation, but before both Robert Kennedy, a sitting US senator and leading presidential candidate, and, of course, Martin Luther King, were killed. I grew up within walking distance of both 16th Street Baptist Church and the Birmingham Jail, surrounded by all manner of people active in the cause.
I was raised by my grandmother, the focus of Me and Mary, and by the family she grafted me into. That book was both a window into the extraordinary woman she was, despite being poor, colored, southern and female, all while living in early twentieth century America, and an attempt to capture some of the many life lessons she taught me.
It was her posture toward the world; the generosity of spirit she exuded and the love for humanity she embodied that made me want to look at both my fellow Americans and our shared story, and learn to see them the way she did, and that I’d always seen her do. If you’ve read the book, The Help, or seen the film, The Long Walk Home, you have a sense of what that life was like, and the time in which Mary lived; the work available to a woman of her station, the deference she and my grandfather had to practice every moment they were out in public, etc.
Every day of the entire 6 months, 12 days I spent in the hospital after birth, she visited; undaunted by those who told her not to get her hopes up – that it would take a miracle for a child that sick, and that early, to survive. But for her, it was a forgone conclusion; I would be coming home. She started walking back and forth to work “over the mountain”, as Birminghamians called the wealthy enclave on the other side of Red Mountain; in order to save up cash, along with S&H green stamps, for the blanket she was determined to bring me home in.
It is she who instilled within me an unshakable belief in humanity and who taught me that no matter who we are, there’s something to love, and truly lovable, about everyone. This lesson would be reinforced in myriad ways by the people I’d meet in this most unlikely of places – 1970s Birmingham. But it was here, during my growing up, that I began to encounter a near-constant parade of ordinary folk – mostly southerners and many of them presenting as white – who were to me what the Good Samaritan was to the man beset by robbers.
There was Vincent Rosetta, the Italian owner of EZ Supermarket, who actually hired me after I came the next day to tell him about having stolen two loaves of the bread left by the deliveryman, on rolling racks, tucked in the entryway the night before, in order to feed my young sisters and brother. And Rev. James Graves, the charismatic African American minister who founded what might be Birmingham’s first intentionally interracial congregation, and who I met through Vincent, who’d allowed James free use of the storefront space next door to launch the church. I became the first member, and James named 10-year-old me the church’s first deacon.
There was the young, Meg Ryan-looking teacher who, unbeknownst to me, paid for and sent in the application for my entry into a high school for gifted and talented students that I didn’t even know existed. And the cashier who kept bringing me shoes, shirts, etc. that she’d always bought for her grandsons. “I’ve lost the receipt and can’t return them,” she’d say every time. “Maybe you can try them on?” They always fit perfectly.
Her husband hired me to work on weekends at their house, pulling weeds, but we spent far more time on his hobby projects and eating cookies his wife had just baked. I’ll never forget the looks that shifted from shock, to indignation, to something resembling remorse, when, while walking down the sidewalk to the hardware store, this elderly Anglo man placed a protective arm around my shoulder like I was his own grandson; wordlessly daring anyone to object.
There was Ms. Jeanette, a beautiful afroed woman who could have been Mavis Staple’s twin. Though a widow raising four kids, she gave me a huge tip each time I walked her home with her groceries. Back before schools were offering free breakfast, she insisted that I bring my younger siblings by her house, where, along with her own kids, she fed us all oatmeal.
And James Pruitt, the likely gay, African American director of the Ramsay Singers – our high school’s award-winning concert choir. Though sight-reading proficiency was a prerequisite, he accepted me despite my being a music illiterate, then, came in early mornings to tutor me, and when I couldn’t afford the performance uniform, he and two other teachers paid for it.
One of those teachers was Helen Mabry, the Anglo Alabama history teacher who never shied away from the hard stuff, who taught me the importance of history, and who talked an incredibly shy boy into becoming VP of the Birmingham Club. And of course, there was my large family – siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles – who gave, and continue to give me, unconditional love, while holding firmly to the belief that I have something special to offer the world.
I’d gone to live with my mother and her family in middle school, and by ninth grade, we’d moved to the Brickyard – a high-density Birmingham housing project named after the brick wall that effectively made it a compound. It was here that I began to take up the mantle of spiritually grounded activism and became a budding community organizer, gathering 500 signatures to petition the City of Birmingham to provide lunches during the summer for kids who would have gotten free lunch during the school year.
I was a high school freshman when Dr. Richard Arrington made a bid to become our city’s first African American mayor, just 15 years after the showdown between Martin and Bull Connor. I volunteered, first canvassing socially white neighborhoods, then, speaking at historically white churches. Sister Rose, a blond, Pentecostal, beehive-wearing, sweetheart of a woman, took it upon herself to both book me at, and drive me to those churches.
She helped me with my little speech, then, insisting that I conclude with a song, accompanied me on piano. Eventually, as part of our society’s shared recognition of segregated housing as a failed experiment (but one that we’re repeating in our handling of homelessness today), the residents of the Brickyard were moved out, and the Brickyard itself, both razed and erased.
I went to college in Oklahoma (or, as they say, "the buckle on the Bible Belt"), where I was one of 400 African American students on a campus of 20,000. While there, I experienced my share of racial slights, as well as young people, exposed to ethnic diversity for the first time, acting out the same bigotry they’d been taught growing up, only to then have the authorities who taught it to them, punish them for it. At the same time, so many others sought to befriend me; almost as a way of pushing back against those very same scripts.
On balance, however, both the university and the people of Oklahoma were very good to me, and their kindness served to only affirm that same faith in humanity my grandmother bequeathed to me. As a result, I look back on my years as a Sooner with great affection. It was there that I realized that ministry was my calling, and though I’ve since had all manner of roles in everything from business to politics, arts to activism, that work, this caring for our collective soul, has always been central to who I am.
I was one of a thousand students who attended the special college service at a local Southern Baptist church, not realizing that there were over 50 denominational variations spanning from the social justice theology held by the likes of Martin and my grandfather Olden – both Baptist ministers – to the version that sanctioned slavery.
There were certainly times that faith institution, so culturally and doctrinally bound up in racialized history, left me feeling othered and alienated. But far more often, from the older alum who donated me a replacement car after a parishioner wrecked my first one, to the students who invited me home and their families who made me feel like I was one of them, it was individual people who both welcomed me in and gave me a sense of belonging.
That church put me on track to attend a Southern Baptist seminary in the San Francisco Bay Area, which led to me, as a young seminarian, serving as minister at a diverse, community-focused church with a deep commitment to inclusion. It was there that I’d come to work alongside a Euro American head pastor 20+ years my senior, and who, as fate would have it, was not just from Birmingham, but the same part of town. We’d apparently shopped at the same stores and frequented the same places.
But white flight hit the neighborhood of Ensley hard. In Sam’s day, everyone at his high school identified as white. By the time my sisters were at that same school, everyone identified as black, whereas I’d come of age during its transition. Sam and I shared remarkable commonalities from having been molded by the same place, ones that were evident enough that people took to calling us the “Birmingham Boys”. That unlikely partnership would be a source of reconciliation and healing for both of us, allowing our shared hometown’s history to teach us important things about how we as a nation can choose a better destiny.
Sam had sayings. And one of them I’ve carried with me is, “We’re already smarter than we are good.” Take American Christians. We’ve already heard more than 200 years’ worth of sermons and sat through millions of hours of Bible study; even as we did everything from defend slavery to devalue women to dehumanize gays. We don’t need to know more; we need to do better.
I've traveled through the deepest parts of the Deep South alone, and have been nothing but welcomed and included, and have experienced the fear of getting pulled over by a police officer in northern California, and felt the pressure – and terror – of having to do everything right so that the man with the gun didn’t feel threatened.
I've lived for years in the South, North, Midwest, West and East and am equal parts Alabamian, Oklahoman, Californian and New Yorker, with a hefty dose of Pacific Northwesterner thrown into the mix. I’m a byproduct of both Ivy and equally outstanding public higher education.
I’ve been shaped by both an exceptional magnet high school and by amazing teachers at my inner city grade school. My way of making sense of the world combines frameworks from both divinity and business school, of social psychology and social activism. And as a chaplain, I've glimpsed America through the eyes of death row inmates and dying AIDS victims, 9/11 survivors and Hurricane Katrina refugees, of cancer patients and social justice protestors.
Through all this, I've had the chance to see a lot of who we Americans are, and it has both instilled in me a deeper love for my country and informed my understanding of what’s happening to it. I know we're not a nation of rabid bigots. But at the same time, our problems are very real, and very deep, and solving them will require that we both do, and be better. Because years of shrinking our sphere of compassion while blaming “those people” for what’s wrong with the world – all in a changing society – is exactly how we bring about our own ending. It’s like the early days of COVID; we were already in the midst of a crisis, we just didn’t know it.
The perspective presented here is both personal and collective. It’s personal because it’s deeply rooted in my own unique combination of qualities and experiences that inform my view of the world; my lens. I identify as multicultural, as an American of African, plus European and trace Native descent. But ancestral mix (and we all have one) is only one aspect of what makes us diverse.
Our lens is equally shaped by the places we’ve lived and experiences we’ve had, by our formal studies, our informal interests, and by the lessons that life itself teaches. Our unique combination of personality (in my case, that of an artistic, highly empathetic, spiritually oriented introvert who takes forever to make decisions) and all manner of personal traits inform us. (I’m left-handed, was 5’1” until 11th grade, and from early childhood, contended with a range of disabilities.)
The rituals of our communities of birth (and the ones we choose for ourselves), as well as the genders and sexualities we are assigned (and the ones we know ourselves to be) all inform our lens. Our traumas and our triumphs, loves and losses, hopes realized and relinquished all shape our lens. But that’s also what makes this collective; because no one’s lens is formed in a vacuum. Everyone who has contributed, in both good and not-so-good ways, to the American story has also impacted us. Which is why we all share so much in common.
As a kid, I was often called nicknames like “Professor” or “Little Martin” – the former for my horn-rimmed glasses, and the latter, perhaps because even back then, I was such an avid evangelist for the message at the heart of the movement. I was very much a true believer; in the principles undergirding the cause, that the world could be a better place, and that each of us had the power to make it so. I’d grow up, however, to find I have far more in common with Bayard Rustin; the gay, unassuming, unsung hero of the Civil Rights movement who stood in the background instead of the spotlight.
A man who, like me, had to struggle to be a whole person, to embrace his ancestry, his sexuality, and his spirituality, even as others, in every group, rejected what didn’t reflect them. Nevertheless, it was Bayard, in many ways, the conscience of the movement, who originally introduced a young Martin to nonviolent resistance, who, through initiatives like the Freedom Riders, made direct social action an interracial effort, and who, perhaps more than anyone, infused the movement with compassion, humanity and inclusion.
I would be well into my 30s before even embarking upon the kind of self-embracing that Bayard, as a teen, had already mastered. But perhaps the most important commonality between me and Bayard, me and Martin, the courageous Rosa Parks, and so many others, is a profound belief in America itself; who she can be, and who, at heart, she’s always been.
It is they, this “great cloud of witnesses”, who instilled within me this desire to articulate a unifying narrative; a version of our shared story that might help us advance instead of turn back, enlarge the tent rather than circle the wagons. I’m not sure if that was achieved, but that was the goal; to help awaken us to the fact that right now, today, we’re authoring our future and, by our actions, shaping our fate. That not seeing the consequences is different from there not being any, and how understanding this difference has never been more important.
Like America herself, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to all those who came before me, and whose insights informed the way I view the world, and as author Barbara Grizzuti Harrison said, “There are no original ideas. There are only original people.” Philosophically, my greatest debt is to Kingian and Civil Rights era thought, in which I’ve been immersed since I was a small boy, and to the inclusive humanitarian spirituality that’s its foundation. I’m grateful for mentors who, by their belief in me, helped me learn to believe in myself.
I’m blessed with a family of origin that has lavished me, unceasingly, with an unfathomable amount of love, and a family of choice; friends whose support has run like anchor points through my life. I’m indebted to the many unnamed medical professionals, those mortal angels who did far more than treat a sickly little kid; they showered him with kindness.
I owe a special thanks to Crystal Crawford, Susanna Reynolds, Jon Garcia, and Steve Nieswander and Ann Voorhees, who struggled through this work at its roughest and still believed this to be an important message. And finally, I want to thank everyone who has opted to use the power of their life to make life better for all of us. Whether artist or preacher, student or teacher, your stories permeate this book, and it is you who taught me that, in the end, it’s what our souls bear forth that matters.
It's quite easy for a people to miss when it is in the midst of a pivotal moment, but that's exactly where we are – at a juncture where the charting of our destiny is as much in our hands today as it was in the hands of those who founded us. The Avett Brothers, in their song, We Americans, include the line, "But I dearly love this land, because of – and in spite of – We, the People." That sums us up fairly well – we, the people – are both the solution and the problem; our greatest hope and our gravest threat.
I truly believe that there remains a better future for us, one where we exist as one nation, indivisible; where both our diversity and that of others is embraced and extolled. But getting there hinges on awareness; of the choices that we're making and the danger we face, both doing things differently and doing different things. In his final sermon, the night before he was felled by an assassin’s bullet, Martin would describe the movement's experience in Birmingham:
We aren't going to let any mace stop us. We are masters in our nonviolent movement in disarming police forces; they don't know what to do, I've seen them so often. I remember in Birmingham, Alabama, when we were in that majestic struggle there, we would move out of the 16th Street Baptist Church day after day; by the hundreds, we would move out. And Bull Connor would tell them to send the dogs forth and they did come; but we just went before the dogs singing, "Ain't gonna let nobody turn me round"
… And then we would be thrown in the paddy wagons, and sometimes we were stacked in there like sardines in a can. And they would throw us in, and old Bull would say, "Take them off," and they did; and we would just go in the paddy wagon singing, "We Shall Overcome." And every now and then we'd get in the jail, and we'd see the jailers looking through the windows being moved by our prayers, and being moved by our words and our songs. And there was a power there which Bull Connor couldn't adjust to; and so we ended up transforming Bull into a steer, and we won our struggle in Birmingham.
He would conclude that sermon with these words; so full of foreshadowing:
Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.
Today, we find ourselves at the crossroads that either leads to the Promised Land that Martin spoke of, or to the beginning of our own ending. Our final destination is chosen not only by the actions we take, but the spirit in which we take them. And this moment, despite its precariousness, affords us far more in the way of opportunity. Right now, more than at any time in our history, we have it within us to finally become the America we've always dreamed of being. But getting there, to this Promised Land where the dream itself has been made real, is something that can only be achieved one way, and that’s together, as a people.
At the same time, however, there’s a perspective that’s unique to me, just as there’s one that’s unique to you, a version of our shared story that only you can tell; one grounded in the person you are, the life you’ve lived, the context that shaped you, the choices you’ve made, and the social vantage point you have, in other words, that which makes you, you.
Just as the act of observing something changes it, all of society is shaped simply by us having been a part of it. At every juncture, there are contributions that only you can make, insights into us as a people that only someone who has lived your life can have. Today, given the challenges facing us, we need what you bring more than ever. I believe the same holds true for me and the life I’ve lived.
My own journey began in Birmingham, Alabama; sandwiched between the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. I was born and grew up in a time and place that was at the epicenter of the Civil Rights movement, and ground zero for our nation’s collective wrestling with race and all that it had wrought.
It was a time of intense turmoil; a period after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which devastated our nation, but before both Robert Kennedy, a sitting US senator and leading presidential candidate, and, of course, Martin Luther King, were killed. I grew up within walking distance of both 16th Street Baptist Church and the Birmingham Jail, surrounded by all manner of people active in the cause.
I was raised by my grandmother, the focus of Me and Mary, and by the family she grafted me into. That book was both a window into the extraordinary woman she was, despite being poor, colored, southern and female, all while living in early twentieth century America, and an attempt to capture some of the many life lessons she taught me.
It was her posture toward the world; the generosity of spirit she exuded and the love for humanity she embodied that made me want to look at both my fellow Americans and our shared story, and learn to see them the way she did, and that I’d always seen her do. If you’ve read the book, The Help, or seen the film, The Long Walk Home, you have a sense of what that life was like, and the time in which Mary lived; the work available to a woman of her station, the deference she and my grandfather had to practice every moment they were out in public, etc.
Every day of the entire 6 months, 12 days I spent in the hospital after birth, she visited; undaunted by those who told her not to get her hopes up – that it would take a miracle for a child that sick, and that early, to survive. But for her, it was a forgone conclusion; I would be coming home. She started walking back and forth to work “over the mountain”, as Birminghamians called the wealthy enclave on the other side of Red Mountain; in order to save up cash, along with S&H green stamps, for the blanket she was determined to bring me home in.
It is she who instilled within me an unshakable belief in humanity and who taught me that no matter who we are, there’s something to love, and truly lovable, about everyone. This lesson would be reinforced in myriad ways by the people I’d meet in this most unlikely of places – 1970s Birmingham. But it was here, during my growing up, that I began to encounter a near-constant parade of ordinary folk – mostly southerners and many of them presenting as white – who were to me what the Good Samaritan was to the man beset by robbers.
There was Vincent Rosetta, the Italian owner of EZ Supermarket, who actually hired me after I came the next day to tell him about having stolen two loaves of the bread left by the deliveryman, on rolling racks, tucked in the entryway the night before, in order to feed my young sisters and brother. And Rev. James Graves, the charismatic African American minister who founded what might be Birmingham’s first intentionally interracial congregation, and who I met through Vincent, who’d allowed James free use of the storefront space next door to launch the church. I became the first member, and James named 10-year-old me the church’s first deacon.
There was the young, Meg Ryan-looking teacher who, unbeknownst to me, paid for and sent in the application for my entry into a high school for gifted and talented students that I didn’t even know existed. And the cashier who kept bringing me shoes, shirts, etc. that she’d always bought for her grandsons. “I’ve lost the receipt and can’t return them,” she’d say every time. “Maybe you can try them on?” They always fit perfectly.
Her husband hired me to work on weekends at their house, pulling weeds, but we spent far more time on his hobby projects and eating cookies his wife had just baked. I’ll never forget the looks that shifted from shock, to indignation, to something resembling remorse, when, while walking down the sidewalk to the hardware store, this elderly Anglo man placed a protective arm around my shoulder like I was his own grandson; wordlessly daring anyone to object.
There was Ms. Jeanette, a beautiful afroed woman who could have been Mavis Staple’s twin. Though a widow raising four kids, she gave me a huge tip each time I walked her home with her groceries. Back before schools were offering free breakfast, she insisted that I bring my younger siblings by her house, where, along with her own kids, she fed us all oatmeal.
And James Pruitt, the likely gay, African American director of the Ramsay Singers – our high school’s award-winning concert choir. Though sight-reading proficiency was a prerequisite, he accepted me despite my being a music illiterate, then, came in early mornings to tutor me, and when I couldn’t afford the performance uniform, he and two other teachers paid for it.
One of those teachers was Helen Mabry, the Anglo Alabama history teacher who never shied away from the hard stuff, who taught me the importance of history, and who talked an incredibly shy boy into becoming VP of the Birmingham Club. And of course, there was my large family – siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles – who gave, and continue to give me, unconditional love, while holding firmly to the belief that I have something special to offer the world.
I’d gone to live with my mother and her family in middle school, and by ninth grade, we’d moved to the Brickyard – a high-density Birmingham housing project named after the brick wall that effectively made it a compound. It was here that I began to take up the mantle of spiritually grounded activism and became a budding community organizer, gathering 500 signatures to petition the City of Birmingham to provide lunches during the summer for kids who would have gotten free lunch during the school year.
I was a high school freshman when Dr. Richard Arrington made a bid to become our city’s first African American mayor, just 15 years after the showdown between Martin and Bull Connor. I volunteered, first canvassing socially white neighborhoods, then, speaking at historically white churches. Sister Rose, a blond, Pentecostal, beehive-wearing, sweetheart of a woman, took it upon herself to both book me at, and drive me to those churches.
She helped me with my little speech, then, insisting that I conclude with a song, accompanied me on piano. Eventually, as part of our society’s shared recognition of segregated housing as a failed experiment (but one that we’re repeating in our handling of homelessness today), the residents of the Brickyard were moved out, and the Brickyard itself, both razed and erased.
I went to college in Oklahoma (or, as they say, "the buckle on the Bible Belt"), where I was one of 400 African American students on a campus of 20,000. While there, I experienced my share of racial slights, as well as young people, exposed to ethnic diversity for the first time, acting out the same bigotry they’d been taught growing up, only to then have the authorities who taught it to them, punish them for it. At the same time, so many others sought to befriend me; almost as a way of pushing back against those very same scripts.
On balance, however, both the university and the people of Oklahoma were very good to me, and their kindness served to only affirm that same faith in humanity my grandmother bequeathed to me. As a result, I look back on my years as a Sooner with great affection. It was there that I realized that ministry was my calling, and though I’ve since had all manner of roles in everything from business to politics, arts to activism, that work, this caring for our collective soul, has always been central to who I am.
I was one of a thousand students who attended the special college service at a local Southern Baptist church, not realizing that there were over 50 denominational variations spanning from the social justice theology held by the likes of Martin and my grandfather Olden – both Baptist ministers – to the version that sanctioned slavery.
There were certainly times that faith institution, so culturally and doctrinally bound up in racialized history, left me feeling othered and alienated. But far more often, from the older alum who donated me a replacement car after a parishioner wrecked my first one, to the students who invited me home and their families who made me feel like I was one of them, it was individual people who both welcomed me in and gave me a sense of belonging.
That church put me on track to attend a Southern Baptist seminary in the San Francisco Bay Area, which led to me, as a young seminarian, serving as minister at a diverse, community-focused church with a deep commitment to inclusion. It was there that I’d come to work alongside a Euro American head pastor 20+ years my senior, and who, as fate would have it, was not just from Birmingham, but the same part of town. We’d apparently shopped at the same stores and frequented the same places.
But white flight hit the neighborhood of Ensley hard. In Sam’s day, everyone at his high school identified as white. By the time my sisters were at that same school, everyone identified as black, whereas I’d come of age during its transition. Sam and I shared remarkable commonalities from having been molded by the same place, ones that were evident enough that people took to calling us the “Birmingham Boys”. That unlikely partnership would be a source of reconciliation and healing for both of us, allowing our shared hometown’s history to teach us important things about how we as a nation can choose a better destiny.
Sam had sayings. And one of them I’ve carried with me is, “We’re already smarter than we are good.” Take American Christians. We’ve already heard more than 200 years’ worth of sermons and sat through millions of hours of Bible study; even as we did everything from defend slavery to devalue women to dehumanize gays. We don’t need to know more; we need to do better.
I've traveled through the deepest parts of the Deep South alone, and have been nothing but welcomed and included, and have experienced the fear of getting pulled over by a police officer in northern California, and felt the pressure – and terror – of having to do everything right so that the man with the gun didn’t feel threatened.
I've lived for years in the South, North, Midwest, West and East and am equal parts Alabamian, Oklahoman, Californian and New Yorker, with a hefty dose of Pacific Northwesterner thrown into the mix. I’m a byproduct of both Ivy and equally outstanding public higher education.
I’ve been shaped by both an exceptional magnet high school and by amazing teachers at my inner city grade school. My way of making sense of the world combines frameworks from both divinity and business school, of social psychology and social activism. And as a chaplain, I've glimpsed America through the eyes of death row inmates and dying AIDS victims, 9/11 survivors and Hurricane Katrina refugees, of cancer patients and social justice protestors.
Through all this, I've had the chance to see a lot of who we Americans are, and it has both instilled in me a deeper love for my country and informed my understanding of what’s happening to it. I know we're not a nation of rabid bigots. But at the same time, our problems are very real, and very deep, and solving them will require that we both do, and be better. Because years of shrinking our sphere of compassion while blaming “those people” for what’s wrong with the world – all in a changing society – is exactly how we bring about our own ending. It’s like the early days of COVID; we were already in the midst of a crisis, we just didn’t know it.
The perspective presented here is both personal and collective. It’s personal because it’s deeply rooted in my own unique combination of qualities and experiences that inform my view of the world; my lens. I identify as multicultural, as an American of African, plus European and trace Native descent. But ancestral mix (and we all have one) is only one aspect of what makes us diverse.
Our lens is equally shaped by the places we’ve lived and experiences we’ve had, by our formal studies, our informal interests, and by the lessons that life itself teaches. Our unique combination of personality (in my case, that of an artistic, highly empathetic, spiritually oriented introvert who takes forever to make decisions) and all manner of personal traits inform us. (I’m left-handed, was 5’1” until 11th grade, and from early childhood, contended with a range of disabilities.)
The rituals of our communities of birth (and the ones we choose for ourselves), as well as the genders and sexualities we are assigned (and the ones we know ourselves to be) all inform our lens. Our traumas and our triumphs, loves and losses, hopes realized and relinquished all shape our lens. But that’s also what makes this collective; because no one’s lens is formed in a vacuum. Everyone who has contributed, in both good and not-so-good ways, to the American story has also impacted us. Which is why we all share so much in common.
As a kid, I was often called nicknames like “Professor” or “Little Martin” – the former for my horn-rimmed glasses, and the latter, perhaps because even back then, I was such an avid evangelist for the message at the heart of the movement. I was very much a true believer; in the principles undergirding the cause, that the world could be a better place, and that each of us had the power to make it so. I’d grow up, however, to find I have far more in common with Bayard Rustin; the gay, unassuming, unsung hero of the Civil Rights movement who stood in the background instead of the spotlight.
A man who, like me, had to struggle to be a whole person, to embrace his ancestry, his sexuality, and his spirituality, even as others, in every group, rejected what didn’t reflect them. Nevertheless, it was Bayard, in many ways, the conscience of the movement, who originally introduced a young Martin to nonviolent resistance, who, through initiatives like the Freedom Riders, made direct social action an interracial effort, and who, perhaps more than anyone, infused the movement with compassion, humanity and inclusion.
I would be well into my 30s before even embarking upon the kind of self-embracing that Bayard, as a teen, had already mastered. But perhaps the most important commonality between me and Bayard, me and Martin, the courageous Rosa Parks, and so many others, is a profound belief in America itself; who she can be, and who, at heart, she’s always been.
It is they, this “great cloud of witnesses”, who instilled within me this desire to articulate a unifying narrative; a version of our shared story that might help us advance instead of turn back, enlarge the tent rather than circle the wagons. I’m not sure if that was achieved, but that was the goal; to help awaken us to the fact that right now, today, we’re authoring our future and, by our actions, shaping our fate. That not seeing the consequences is different from there not being any, and how understanding this difference has never been more important.
Like America herself, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to all those who came before me, and whose insights informed the way I view the world, and as author Barbara Grizzuti Harrison said, “There are no original ideas. There are only original people.” Philosophically, my greatest debt is to Kingian and Civil Rights era thought, in which I’ve been immersed since I was a small boy, and to the inclusive humanitarian spirituality that’s its foundation. I’m grateful for mentors who, by their belief in me, helped me learn to believe in myself.
I’m blessed with a family of origin that has lavished me, unceasingly, with an unfathomable amount of love, and a family of choice; friends whose support has run like anchor points through my life. I’m indebted to the many unnamed medical professionals, those mortal angels who did far more than treat a sickly little kid; they showered him with kindness.
I owe a special thanks to Crystal Crawford, Susanna Reynolds, Jon Garcia, and Steve Nieswander and Ann Voorhees, who struggled through this work at its roughest and still believed this to be an important message. And finally, I want to thank everyone who has opted to use the power of their life to make life better for all of us. Whether artist or preacher, student or teacher, your stories permeate this book, and it is you who taught me that, in the end, it’s what our souls bear forth that matters.
It's quite easy for a people to miss when it is in the midst of a pivotal moment, but that's exactly where we are – at a juncture where the charting of our destiny is as much in our hands today as it was in the hands of those who founded us. The Avett Brothers, in their song, We Americans, include the line, "But I dearly love this land, because of – and in spite of – We, the People." That sums us up fairly well – we, the people – are both the solution and the problem; our greatest hope and our gravest threat.
I truly believe that there remains a better future for us, one where we exist as one nation, indivisible; where both our diversity and that of others is embraced and extolled. But getting there hinges on awareness; of the choices that we're making and the danger we face, both doing things differently and doing different things. In his final sermon, the night before he was felled by an assassin’s bullet, Martin would describe the movement's experience in Birmingham:
We aren't going to let any mace stop us. We are masters in our nonviolent movement in disarming police forces; they don't know what to do, I've seen them so often. I remember in Birmingham, Alabama, when we were in that majestic struggle there, we would move out of the 16th Street Baptist Church day after day; by the hundreds, we would move out. And Bull Connor would tell them to send the dogs forth and they did come; but we just went before the dogs singing, "Ain't gonna let nobody turn me round"
… And then we would be thrown in the paddy wagons, and sometimes we were stacked in there like sardines in a can. And they would throw us in, and old Bull would say, "Take them off," and they did; and we would just go in the paddy wagon singing, "We Shall Overcome." And every now and then we'd get in the jail, and we'd see the jailers looking through the windows being moved by our prayers, and being moved by our words and our songs. And there was a power there which Bull Connor couldn't adjust to; and so we ended up transforming Bull into a steer, and we won our struggle in Birmingham.
He would conclude that sermon with these words; so full of foreshadowing:
Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.
Today, we find ourselves at the crossroads that either leads to the Promised Land that Martin spoke of, or to the beginning of our own ending. Our final destination is chosen not only by the actions we take, but the spirit in which we take them. And this moment, despite its precariousness, affords us far more in the way of opportunity. Right now, more than at any time in our history, we have it within us to finally become the America we've always dreamed of being. But getting there, to this Promised Land where the dream itself has been made real, is something that can only be achieved one way, and that’s together, as a people.
Introduction (expand)
Clarettia was a hairdresser in Marin County, California. But summing her up in that way makes her sound oh so ordinary. She was anything but. A full-bodied, strikingly beautiful woman of unambiguously African descent, with waist-length hair that was all hers and four-inch stiletto heels, she was hard to miss – especially in a place where, in the early 90s, over 95% of the population presented as white. But Clarettia, who wore both her uniqueness and her brilliant smile like a crown, wasn’t at all deterred.
Both she and her business thrived, and given her talent, she was one of the most sought-after stylists in the Bay Area. Sitting in her salon chair was always more therapy session than hairstyling; reflective of Clarettia’s first full career; she’d been a social worker who tirelessly advocated on behalf of an island of poverty in an ocean of prosperity. Though she’d eventually change professions, she still found herself being who she was; both caring for those in need, and, just as importantly, serving as an ambassador for diversity in a society where it was often disparaged.
Her trademark was helping people turn something they saw as a liability into an asset. People who sat in Clarettia’s chair left with far more than a makeover; by learning to appreciate their own unique beauty, they also learned to see the same in others. The secret to her success was simple – she truly, genuinely cared for people and saw everyone as invaluable. Sadly, Clarettia would succumb to cancer at the height of her career, and for those who had the chance to know her, the loss would be profound. Yet it is those who will never meet her who are the most bereft. This book is about Clarettia.
Jim, as a twenty-something, Euro American man in 1970s Birmingham, always stood out. Not just because of his lanky build, good looks, and Matthew McConaughey grin, but because of his heart. There had always been far more to Jim than charisma and a good golf swing. It was as if he’d made it his personal mission to acknowledge humanity; both his and others friends and strangers, young and old. And despite frowns and stern looks, African Americans, and especially of the working class.
I never knew his growing up story, but someone, perhaps a woman like my own grandmother Mary, gave him unconditional love, and in doing so, likewise taught him to love. I met Jim at the A & P where I worked as a kid. I helped him take his groceries to his car (which he didn’t need, and in fact, he mostly loaded them himself). He always tipped me though, as if I’d actually done something. But what I will forever appreciate about Jim was his befriending of my younger brother; eight-year-old Joe.
Jim lived a few blocks from the supermarket, and somehow, he and my brother, who could make anyone smile, formed an unlikely friendship. Joe got a role model and Jim got the kid brother he’d clearly always wanted; something no one would have expected to happen in a racially charged Birmingham. Jim took Joe to see the Birmingham Barons play, and they spent more than a few Saturday afternoons trying to beat one another on Jim’s Atari console.
Jim and his girlfriend took Joe on his first trip to the beach, to the movies (where Joe reportedly caught them kissing), and had him over for barbeques at Jim’s house, along with their other friends. Joe boasted that he could beat everyone at arm wrestling (he couldn’t), and Jim was immensely proud of Joe, in that way that only a big brother can be. This book is about Jim. But it’s not specifically about Clarettia and Jim as individuals, nor because they’re so extraordinarily special. It’s about how they, as ordinary people, lived in ways that epitomize the best of us Americans and of humankind.
In that sense, this book is equally about people like Officer Roberts, the prison guard portrayed in Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us, who, according to young Korey Wise of the Central Park Five, instead of responding in violence, hugged Korey, as the young man cried out in anguish, "Nobody gives a fuck about me," broken in overwhelming grief over the loss of Marci, his trans sister. And at the same time, it’s about Korey, who offered his sister full acceptance and unconditional love when so few others did, not to mention the extraordinary moral courage of Marci herself, to live her truth at a time when it was neither accepted nor allowed.
It’s about the founders of the Omaha, NE, Tri-Faith Initiative, which brings Christian, Islamic and Jewish worshippers together on one plot of land, and about young Greisa Martinez Rosas, the Executive Director of United We Dream, the largest immigrant youth-led community in the country; who boldly describes herself as “undocumented, unafraid, queer and unashamed”.
It’s about the thousands of women – especially African American women – who were on the forefront of, as well as leaders and sustainers of nationwide protests against police brutality, as they have done time and again in our country, and it’s about the group of black-identifying men in Louisville, all strangers out protesting deaths at the hands of police, who formed a protective shield around a lone officer who’d gotten separated from his unit and escorted him to his car.
It is about people like Brenda White Bull, descendant of Sitting Bull, who took the fight against Dakota Access and against state-sanctioned police violence all the way to the United Nations, and long-time civil rights activist Grace Lee Boggs, second generation Chinese and widow of African American activist James Boggs, to whom she was married for 40+ years. Grace would continue working to alleviate poverty across Detroit until her death, in 2015, at 100 years old.
It’s about essential workers who, through the worst of COVID, put themselves at risk on behalf of the rest of us, and about those who, through their service in everything from our military to the Peace Corps, dedicated their lives to doing the same. It is people like them, this new breed of American who have, since our founding, compelled us to be a better people, and in doing so, were heralds of the America we’re now on the cusp of becoming.
But above all, this book is about you. And especially those of you who’ve been told to hide yourself, to step back, that we don’t need you, that there’s no place for you here. I want to say emphatically – they were, in all ways, unequivocally wrong. This land is indeed your land. You are as much an heir to the whole of America and your claim to this place is as legitimate as anyone else’s. No one can tell you to “go back where you belong” or “get back in your place”. You’re already there. Further, only you, by being authentically you, can make the difference that you can make. And given how we’re changing, you’ve never been more needed. Like Princess Leah said to Obi-Wan, “You’re our only hope.”
Over America’s existence, there have been approximately 545 million lives lived; all of which have shaped us – some have made us better, and others, worse. But every life left its mark, on America, and on who America is because of them. Then, there’s who we are together. Like individuals, societies also have a life, and with that life, they shape the broader human story. Some have made us better, and others, worse; with each society getting to determine what their contribution to that grand story will be.
But while this book is about everyone, it’s not necessarily for everyone. It’s for people like those mentioned above; ones who persist in holding love in their hearts despite humankind’s lapses. It’s for those who get that, to paraphrase Einstein, we can’t solve our problems using the same tactics that created them. And it’s for those who are willing to take responsibility for how each of us shapes the fate of all of us. Because it’s not just the times that are a-changin; we, the people, are, and the same tools that once elevated some and debased others, now threaten to drown us all. They’re our own version of the Greek Symplegades, the Clashing Rocks.
We Americans have gotten so adept at impairing ourselves that we hardly notice we’re doing it. We recycle the same old scripts; asserting that we’re better, and because we’ve declared the rest of us worse, that they deserve what’s happening to them. Or often, what we’re doing to them. Like Cain to Abel (or Set to Osiris), we tell ourselves that our disavowing of our societal kin is justified.
But exploitation, like eating all our Halloween candy in one night, seems like a great idea. Until it isn’t. That’s because the Golden Rule isn’t just theoretical (“as you’d have them do unto you”); it’s prophetic. And since change is inevitable and diversity unstoppable, others will always get their chance to do unto us the very things we’ve done unto others.
The premise here is simple: every major societal problem we Americans are facing today, from rising poverty to increasingly caustic elections to escalating unrest and diminishing human regard, is tied to this massive sociological shift we’re already deep into, one where, in every way we currently measure, we’ll soon be a post-majority nation. In 20 years, our core majorities, from social whiteness to Christianization to heteronormativity, will all be downgraded to minority status.
But the systems we have, from the economy to the vote and the law, and until recently, even things like who was represented in commercials, were built to support majorities that soon will no longer exist and for a people we’ll no longer be. It’s up to us to do the work to transform our society into one where we all can thrive. Our path forward begins with Diversity, Democracy, and Humanity, three generative qualities that allow any society that embraces them to thrive.
Yet, few societies become places like this. That’s because there are actors among us who are working at cross-purposes with sustainability; less because they want us to fail and more due to three weaknesses we all, in varying degrees, share: an insatiable hunger for more (avarice); blinding fixations (myopia), and debilitating self-supremacy (hubris). These impulses are so strong that no matter where we are in history, and no matter our societal structure, when trouble comes, they continue to rush us headlong over the cliff. The test for you and me is whether our lives will contribute to the avoidance of this fate or to the sealing of it.
While this book is primarily about American society and our colorful history, so chock full of both successes and failures (as the adage goes, “write what you know”), this story is by no means the exclusive province of this country. In fact, much of what makes America “America” is only possible due to copious borrowing from so many other societies; both past and present, both with and without permission.
The goal is to set forth a set of ideas that, while rooted in the American story, have broader applicability, especially given that similar sociological shifts are occurring all over the world. But it is, at its heart, the story of us Americans; past, present and the future we choose. We’ll touch on the lives of extraordinary individuals who propelled us forward, as well as others who, believing in their own supremacy, pressed for their advantage at all costs, and in doing so, imperiled America herself.
There are consequences for letting our worst impulses go unchecked and unchallenged, ones that are more evident today than perhaps ever. Which leads us to America’s home-grown brand of social supremacy, one first manifest as slavery and Native displacement, before evolving into everything from racism to xenophobia. We’ll examine how this toxic ideology was crafted, and how it runs, like a fault line, through everything we’ve done, everything we’ve built, and everything we are. It’s the Frankenstein’s monster that we not only brought to life, but that we, by our choices, keep feeding.
The story itself pulls from a variety of sources, from the likes of writer James Baldwin to singer James Taylor, from Jesus to Rumi, and from presidents to those on the margins. But it’s the ideas most famously articulated by M.L.K., by Martin, which serve as this work’s foundation and its framing.
Finally, though parts history, analysis, and reflection, this book is, at its core, a story, an unfinished one that, together, we’re writing right now. It’s about our shared spiritual journey; who we can be at our best and who we have been at our worst, and about the “us” we are still becoming. It’s about the hope that, time and again, has grounded us; not the fingers-crossed, knock-on-wood variety that cynics mock or dismiss as naivete. It’s the weathered kind that, at every turn, has proven itself undeniable. The kind that undergirds our past, when our Founders declared “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all… are created equal.”
The kind that anchors us in the present, that compelled Bree Newsome, descendant of South Carolina slaves, to scale the flagpole on the grounds of the state capitol that still flew the Confederate battle flag and remove it, and that led Heather Heyer, an Anglo counter-protestor of a white nationalist rally to declare to the world, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” Both were willing to risk their lives to ensure that today, “… indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” is far more than a pledge we recite. And it’s the kind that charters our future, invoked in that shared aspiration, “We, the people of the United States of America, in order to form a more perfect union...”
We’re picking up that story in the middle; right at this perilous place where we now find ourselves. Part One, The Beginning of the End is about our trajectory; from the Age of Promise, through the Age of Opportunism, to the Age of Recompense – our here and now.
We’ll explore how the culture we built (both revolutionary and reactionary) and choices we made (both kind and cruel), led us to this point, how our nation’s tectonic plates are shifting, and what that shifting requires of us. And we’ll get a sense of the vast diversity that made the United States itself possible, how this same diversity was penalized, subjugated, and, even eradicated, and of the corrosive constructs that pushed us in this direction.
Part Two, What a Fool Believes, delves into how otherwise flourishing societies become dysfunctional; locking themselves into iterative, accelerating processes of self-authored decline. This Degenerative Cycle (DGC) is comprised of Five AREAS; Alienation, Rationalization, Exploitation, Automation, Socialization, and back to Alienation. But with each revolution, there’s a bit less of all those things that make us, us. It’s what makes this an existential moment, every bit as critical as the Revolutionary or Civil War. Those before us may have decided who we are. But it rests with us to determine who we will be, what will become of us.
Which leads to Part Three, If You’re Out There, and to the Four Actions: Looking Deeper (Social Intelligence), Doing Better (Social Engagement), Drawing Closer (Social Cohesion), and Reaching Higher (Social Responsibility); or, in the language of my spiritual tradition, Wisdom, Justice, Kindness and Conscience; how each of us shapes the fate of all of us. If corrosive constructs and the DGC are how we ended up in the quicksand, the Actions are how we get out. We then return to our starting point, Diversity, Democracy and Humanity, the primal fires that, at the onset, forged us into a people. They might burn less fiercely in our chests, but they still burn, and as long as they do, both the dream and hope remains.
In the grand library chronicling the story of humankind, each person gets to write a sentence; each society a chapter. And herein lies our opportunity; to, individually and collectively, make our contribution, unequivocally, a good one. And it is in that sense that this is a revolutionary book. But the revolution is a personal one; each of us has the power to ensure that our generation meets this challenge, instead of being felled by it. But we can only do that by understanding how the society we’ve built is both beautiful and broken, by learning to celebrate the former and mend the latter, and by truly living up to our name – the United States of America. This is how we choose for ourselves a better destiny and chart for ourselves an enduring way forward.
Both she and her business thrived, and given her talent, she was one of the most sought-after stylists in the Bay Area. Sitting in her salon chair was always more therapy session than hairstyling; reflective of Clarettia’s first full career; she’d been a social worker who tirelessly advocated on behalf of an island of poverty in an ocean of prosperity. Though she’d eventually change professions, she still found herself being who she was; both caring for those in need, and, just as importantly, serving as an ambassador for diversity in a society where it was often disparaged.
Her trademark was helping people turn something they saw as a liability into an asset. People who sat in Clarettia’s chair left with far more than a makeover; by learning to appreciate their own unique beauty, they also learned to see the same in others. The secret to her success was simple – she truly, genuinely cared for people and saw everyone as invaluable. Sadly, Clarettia would succumb to cancer at the height of her career, and for those who had the chance to know her, the loss would be profound. Yet it is those who will never meet her who are the most bereft. This book is about Clarettia.
Jim, as a twenty-something, Euro American man in 1970s Birmingham, always stood out. Not just because of his lanky build, good looks, and Matthew McConaughey grin, but because of his heart. There had always been far more to Jim than charisma and a good golf swing. It was as if he’d made it his personal mission to acknowledge humanity; both his and others friends and strangers, young and old. And despite frowns and stern looks, African Americans, and especially of the working class.
I never knew his growing up story, but someone, perhaps a woman like my own grandmother Mary, gave him unconditional love, and in doing so, likewise taught him to love. I met Jim at the A & P where I worked as a kid. I helped him take his groceries to his car (which he didn’t need, and in fact, he mostly loaded them himself). He always tipped me though, as if I’d actually done something. But what I will forever appreciate about Jim was his befriending of my younger brother; eight-year-old Joe.
Jim lived a few blocks from the supermarket, and somehow, he and my brother, who could make anyone smile, formed an unlikely friendship. Joe got a role model and Jim got the kid brother he’d clearly always wanted; something no one would have expected to happen in a racially charged Birmingham. Jim took Joe to see the Birmingham Barons play, and they spent more than a few Saturday afternoons trying to beat one another on Jim’s Atari console.
Jim and his girlfriend took Joe on his first trip to the beach, to the movies (where Joe reportedly caught them kissing), and had him over for barbeques at Jim’s house, along with their other friends. Joe boasted that he could beat everyone at arm wrestling (he couldn’t), and Jim was immensely proud of Joe, in that way that only a big brother can be. This book is about Jim. But it’s not specifically about Clarettia and Jim as individuals, nor because they’re so extraordinarily special. It’s about how they, as ordinary people, lived in ways that epitomize the best of us Americans and of humankind.
In that sense, this book is equally about people like Officer Roberts, the prison guard portrayed in Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us, who, according to young Korey Wise of the Central Park Five, instead of responding in violence, hugged Korey, as the young man cried out in anguish, "Nobody gives a fuck about me," broken in overwhelming grief over the loss of Marci, his trans sister. And at the same time, it’s about Korey, who offered his sister full acceptance and unconditional love when so few others did, not to mention the extraordinary moral courage of Marci herself, to live her truth at a time when it was neither accepted nor allowed.
It’s about the founders of the Omaha, NE, Tri-Faith Initiative, which brings Christian, Islamic and Jewish worshippers together on one plot of land, and about young Greisa Martinez Rosas, the Executive Director of United We Dream, the largest immigrant youth-led community in the country; who boldly describes herself as “undocumented, unafraid, queer and unashamed”.
It’s about the thousands of women – especially African American women – who were on the forefront of, as well as leaders and sustainers of nationwide protests against police brutality, as they have done time and again in our country, and it’s about the group of black-identifying men in Louisville, all strangers out protesting deaths at the hands of police, who formed a protective shield around a lone officer who’d gotten separated from his unit and escorted him to his car.
It is about people like Brenda White Bull, descendant of Sitting Bull, who took the fight against Dakota Access and against state-sanctioned police violence all the way to the United Nations, and long-time civil rights activist Grace Lee Boggs, second generation Chinese and widow of African American activist James Boggs, to whom she was married for 40+ years. Grace would continue working to alleviate poverty across Detroit until her death, in 2015, at 100 years old.
It’s about essential workers who, through the worst of COVID, put themselves at risk on behalf of the rest of us, and about those who, through their service in everything from our military to the Peace Corps, dedicated their lives to doing the same. It is people like them, this new breed of American who have, since our founding, compelled us to be a better people, and in doing so, were heralds of the America we’re now on the cusp of becoming.
But above all, this book is about you. And especially those of you who’ve been told to hide yourself, to step back, that we don’t need you, that there’s no place for you here. I want to say emphatically – they were, in all ways, unequivocally wrong. This land is indeed your land. You are as much an heir to the whole of America and your claim to this place is as legitimate as anyone else’s. No one can tell you to “go back where you belong” or “get back in your place”. You’re already there. Further, only you, by being authentically you, can make the difference that you can make. And given how we’re changing, you’ve never been more needed. Like Princess Leah said to Obi-Wan, “You’re our only hope.”
Over America’s existence, there have been approximately 545 million lives lived; all of which have shaped us – some have made us better, and others, worse. But every life left its mark, on America, and on who America is because of them. Then, there’s who we are together. Like individuals, societies also have a life, and with that life, they shape the broader human story. Some have made us better, and others, worse; with each society getting to determine what their contribution to that grand story will be.
But while this book is about everyone, it’s not necessarily for everyone. It’s for people like those mentioned above; ones who persist in holding love in their hearts despite humankind’s lapses. It’s for those who get that, to paraphrase Einstein, we can’t solve our problems using the same tactics that created them. And it’s for those who are willing to take responsibility for how each of us shapes the fate of all of us. Because it’s not just the times that are a-changin; we, the people, are, and the same tools that once elevated some and debased others, now threaten to drown us all. They’re our own version of the Greek Symplegades, the Clashing Rocks.
We Americans have gotten so adept at impairing ourselves that we hardly notice we’re doing it. We recycle the same old scripts; asserting that we’re better, and because we’ve declared the rest of us worse, that they deserve what’s happening to them. Or often, what we’re doing to them. Like Cain to Abel (or Set to Osiris), we tell ourselves that our disavowing of our societal kin is justified.
But exploitation, like eating all our Halloween candy in one night, seems like a great idea. Until it isn’t. That’s because the Golden Rule isn’t just theoretical (“as you’d have them do unto you”); it’s prophetic. And since change is inevitable and diversity unstoppable, others will always get their chance to do unto us the very things we’ve done unto others.
The premise here is simple: every major societal problem we Americans are facing today, from rising poverty to increasingly caustic elections to escalating unrest and diminishing human regard, is tied to this massive sociological shift we’re already deep into, one where, in every way we currently measure, we’ll soon be a post-majority nation. In 20 years, our core majorities, from social whiteness to Christianization to heteronormativity, will all be downgraded to minority status.
But the systems we have, from the economy to the vote and the law, and until recently, even things like who was represented in commercials, were built to support majorities that soon will no longer exist and for a people we’ll no longer be. It’s up to us to do the work to transform our society into one where we all can thrive. Our path forward begins with Diversity, Democracy, and Humanity, three generative qualities that allow any society that embraces them to thrive.
Yet, few societies become places like this. That’s because there are actors among us who are working at cross-purposes with sustainability; less because they want us to fail and more due to three weaknesses we all, in varying degrees, share: an insatiable hunger for more (avarice); blinding fixations (myopia), and debilitating self-supremacy (hubris). These impulses are so strong that no matter where we are in history, and no matter our societal structure, when trouble comes, they continue to rush us headlong over the cliff. The test for you and me is whether our lives will contribute to the avoidance of this fate or to the sealing of it.
While this book is primarily about American society and our colorful history, so chock full of both successes and failures (as the adage goes, “write what you know”), this story is by no means the exclusive province of this country. In fact, much of what makes America “America” is only possible due to copious borrowing from so many other societies; both past and present, both with and without permission.
The goal is to set forth a set of ideas that, while rooted in the American story, have broader applicability, especially given that similar sociological shifts are occurring all over the world. But it is, at its heart, the story of us Americans; past, present and the future we choose. We’ll touch on the lives of extraordinary individuals who propelled us forward, as well as others who, believing in their own supremacy, pressed for their advantage at all costs, and in doing so, imperiled America herself.
There are consequences for letting our worst impulses go unchecked and unchallenged, ones that are more evident today than perhaps ever. Which leads us to America’s home-grown brand of social supremacy, one first manifest as slavery and Native displacement, before evolving into everything from racism to xenophobia. We’ll examine how this toxic ideology was crafted, and how it runs, like a fault line, through everything we’ve done, everything we’ve built, and everything we are. It’s the Frankenstein’s monster that we not only brought to life, but that we, by our choices, keep feeding.
The story itself pulls from a variety of sources, from the likes of writer James Baldwin to singer James Taylor, from Jesus to Rumi, and from presidents to those on the margins. But it’s the ideas most famously articulated by M.L.K., by Martin, which serve as this work’s foundation and its framing.
Finally, though parts history, analysis, and reflection, this book is, at its core, a story, an unfinished one that, together, we’re writing right now. It’s about our shared spiritual journey; who we can be at our best and who we have been at our worst, and about the “us” we are still becoming. It’s about the hope that, time and again, has grounded us; not the fingers-crossed, knock-on-wood variety that cynics mock or dismiss as naivete. It’s the weathered kind that, at every turn, has proven itself undeniable. The kind that undergirds our past, when our Founders declared “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all… are created equal.”
The kind that anchors us in the present, that compelled Bree Newsome, descendant of South Carolina slaves, to scale the flagpole on the grounds of the state capitol that still flew the Confederate battle flag and remove it, and that led Heather Heyer, an Anglo counter-protestor of a white nationalist rally to declare to the world, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” Both were willing to risk their lives to ensure that today, “… indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” is far more than a pledge we recite. And it’s the kind that charters our future, invoked in that shared aspiration, “We, the people of the United States of America, in order to form a more perfect union...”
We’re picking up that story in the middle; right at this perilous place where we now find ourselves. Part One, The Beginning of the End is about our trajectory; from the Age of Promise, through the Age of Opportunism, to the Age of Recompense – our here and now.
We’ll explore how the culture we built (both revolutionary and reactionary) and choices we made (both kind and cruel), led us to this point, how our nation’s tectonic plates are shifting, and what that shifting requires of us. And we’ll get a sense of the vast diversity that made the United States itself possible, how this same diversity was penalized, subjugated, and, even eradicated, and of the corrosive constructs that pushed us in this direction.
Part Two, What a Fool Believes, delves into how otherwise flourishing societies become dysfunctional; locking themselves into iterative, accelerating processes of self-authored decline. This Degenerative Cycle (DGC) is comprised of Five AREAS; Alienation, Rationalization, Exploitation, Automation, Socialization, and back to Alienation. But with each revolution, there’s a bit less of all those things that make us, us. It’s what makes this an existential moment, every bit as critical as the Revolutionary or Civil War. Those before us may have decided who we are. But it rests with us to determine who we will be, what will become of us.
Which leads to Part Three, If You’re Out There, and to the Four Actions: Looking Deeper (Social Intelligence), Doing Better (Social Engagement), Drawing Closer (Social Cohesion), and Reaching Higher (Social Responsibility); or, in the language of my spiritual tradition, Wisdom, Justice, Kindness and Conscience; how each of us shapes the fate of all of us. If corrosive constructs and the DGC are how we ended up in the quicksand, the Actions are how we get out. We then return to our starting point, Diversity, Democracy and Humanity, the primal fires that, at the onset, forged us into a people. They might burn less fiercely in our chests, but they still burn, and as long as they do, both the dream and hope remains.
In the grand library chronicling the story of humankind, each person gets to write a sentence; each society a chapter. And herein lies our opportunity; to, individually and collectively, make our contribution, unequivocally, a good one. And it is in that sense that this is a revolutionary book. But the revolution is a personal one; each of us has the power to ensure that our generation meets this challenge, instead of being felled by it. But we can only do that by understanding how the society we’ve built is both beautiful and broken, by learning to celebrate the former and mend the latter, and by truly living up to our name – the United States of America. This is how we choose for ourselves a better destiny and chart for ourselves an enduring way forward.
I. The Three ages (or beginning of the end)
Chapter 1 - Bad moon rising (expand)
Chapter 1 - Bad moon rising (expand)
Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, nobody knows my sorrow. – Slavery-era Spiritual, sang by Civil Rights Icon Bayard Rustin
Between what might be, and what has been, this is the beginning; this is the beginning of the end. – Steve Moakler, Beginning of the End
“I see the bad moon a-rising,” sang Creedence Clearwater Revival’s John Fogerty. “I see trouble on the way. I see earthquakes and lightning,” he continued, “I see bad times today.” That sentiment, captured in one of CCR’s most iconic songs is more than great imagery; it increasingly describes the prevailing perspective of people across our nation.
And that’s the thing — though we might not fully grasp how we ended up here, or clearly see the choices that led us here, at least we’re honest. If there’s one thing we Americans know, it’s how to spot trouble when we see it. But this also isn’t the routine Saturday Night’s Alright (for Fighting) kind of trouble Elton sang about. It’s the kind that, to quote President Lincoln, “Tests whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.”
I fear rivers overflowing. I hear the voice of rage and ruin. Don’t come ‘round tonight. Well, it’s bound to take your life. There’s a bad moon on the rise.
But at the same time, none of this is really new. From the Revolutionary War to the Civil War, from the Great Depression to the tumultuous ‘60s, from the oil crisis in the ‘80s to the Great Recession, from political gamesmanship to social injustice, we, the people, have far more experience with unrest than we do with rest. Despite our prayers for peace, we’re a nation that’s repeatedly declared war on itself. But what might be the most troubling about this kind of trouble is how we end up overlooking a core truth of societies — they start to die the day we decide that some people don’t matter.
Today, getting this right is more important than ever. Because at its core is the cultural equivalent of a 9.0 earthquake – we’re changing in unprecedented ways, but lack the frameworks to survive this new reality. Take the idea of race, the lynchpin of American identity. The abolition of slavery ended a lot more than the institution itself. It abolished the paradigm that made our nation work – the distinction between slave and free – both people and states.
In the vacuum, we invented a replacement framework, one that could take up where slavery left off, and by the late 1800s, it had a name – we called it “whiteness”. Over time, we’d Anglicize and fold over 80 distinct people groups into it, we’d make white status a prerequisite for citizenship, and we’d use that group’s political power to build an American ruling class.
But that time is over. We’re already long past the moment non-Anglo births surpassed Anglo births. In 5 years, that birth cohort reaches voting age, and in just 20, we’ll be a nation with no ethnic majority. Or, take religion, where we’ve gone from forced conversions during slavery to a time when those same groups are shrinking, and where our largest and fastest-growing faith affiliation is “none”.
Then, there’s our shifting understanding of both gender and sexuality. Today, 25% of Generation Y identifies as non-straight (compared to 2.5% of Gen X) and the gender binary, increasingly abandoned – and that’s before getting to the massive majority that now sees marriage as a civil right. All three are examples of how constructs that once alienated the targeted are now isolating those who did the targeting.
Like giant glaciers, our demographic and psychographic mix, the ways we humans classify ourselves, are constantly and inevitably changing. That’s always been the case, from the earliest humans on. The fabricated homogeneity of the United States has always been at odds with reality; a world where the entire European diaspora represents only 10% of humans alive. From the time the Pilgrims landed, this shift was already occurring here.
But recently, everything from international flights to the interconnectivity the internet provides, from the rise of multinational companies to mass migration and culture-blending, we’ve seen an acceleration unlike anything in history. As a result, this non-Euro-centric, multicultural, multinational population where both authoritarian religion and heteronormativity are on the decline is not just humankind’s future. It’s our present.
Finally, there’s us as individuals. We’ve always known that we’re all different, that each of us is an “n” of one. That’s why some of us found it necessary to invent typologies; ones designed to ostensibly bring order to our world. But again, this is where we get it wrong. Those typologies were built to do the exact opposite of what we thought they did, and what we’ve been told that they do. They don't protect us from the “dangerous other”; they’re the mechanism by which the actual othering is done.
They’re the tools that allow differentiated people to declare themselves the same, and in doing so, the new power. So, when supremacists say, "OUR RACE IS OUR NATION," they're essentially rewriting the Constitution; asserting that everywhere that refers to "nation" or “the people” is actually a reference to social whiteness, as defined by them.
Or, take religion. Since our 1954 push to include the phrase “under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance (incidentally, the same year as Brown v. Board), we’ve been dead-set on declaring ourselves not only a Christian nation but a certain kind of Christian; the kind that blessed slavery, honored segregation, and preached the gospel of racial superiority, the kind that believes that only issues impacting a segment of us matter. “There’s a right way and a wrong way, to walk down a lonely highway,” Steve Moakler sang in Beginning of the End, “And I’ve been on both sides of the road.” As have we all.
But this isn’t just about our constructs or institutions, it’s about ourselves. The problem we’re facing is very much a spiritual one; increasingly evident in our inability to connect the dots between individual actions and collective outcomes, between the people we are and the society we have. We’re a nation suffering from three grievous wounds – allowing corrosive constructs to poison our culture (Part One), ignoring how taking advantage of some of us inevitably harms all of us (Part Two), and refusing to see how our individual actions shape our shared destiny (Part Three). We Americans have embraced these malignant practices so thoroughly that, across the board, irrespective of politics or geography, ethnicity or ideology, they’ve become our new normal. But that’s entirely self-defeating. The only thing doubling down on human disregard can succeed at doing is accelerating our descent.
We'll get into why tactics like these worked for a while (as well as why they were always doomed to fail) later. Most important here is understanding that they weren’t handed down from Mount Olympus or Sinai; they were constructed, and that hardly anything in this world is built, whether business or belief system, without an expected return on investment. Which is why we, failing to grasp the severity of our situation, charged ahead; cannibalizing diversity, then, rewriting history to justify what we’d done to our societal kin. But what happens when the minorities are the new majority (or, as Bob Dylan put it, “the slow one will later be fast”)? Because it’s through our doing unto others that we teach others what’s acceptable to do unto us. So, yes, we've seen trouble before. But also not quite like this.
The actual words spoken by astronaut Jack Swigert were, "Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here." And when those supporting the Apollo 13 mission heard them, they leapt into action. The question for those on the ground was not, "Who can we blame for this?" Nor was their focus on who would get credit. They weren't fixated on campaigning; convincing people to back their ideas – even if those ideas were the wrong ones. It was all about solving the problem.
Over this three-part journey, that's our challenge; to revisit and learn from our social history, America's shared story. It's a sense-making endeavor; a delving into the workings of our own hearts, and how we choose a better destiny. The hope is, despite our continual history of so often rendering harm to get ahead, that we can prove that there's far more to us than that. Together, we can embrace a future that includes everyone in "we, the people" and that inspires each of us to “form a more perfect union”. But we only get there by understanding how we got here.
The work before us requires the challenging of an assumption that most of us carry; that there are individuals, and even entire groups, who we believe to be inferior or disposable, worthless or irredeemable, that we’d all be better off without. Or, put another way, the reason they do evil is because they're evil; the reason we do evil is because we made a mistake. But even the most cursory examination of human nature reveals hearts that are capable of both; people who perpetrate the worst crimes against humanity – who commit genocide, or enslave others, who poison children's drinking water or steal old people's retirement – even they have people they love, and whom they’d lay down their lives for. They're not just cardboard villains. They have dreams. They've committed selfless acts of true kindness. Humanity lives in them just as it does in us. It was Marvin Gaye who sang, "We're all sensitive people, with so much to give, since we’ve got to be here, let’s live." And he was right.
So, if humanity is our factory setting, and if we, and the arc of the moral universe "bends toward justice", how did we end up here? That's the question, along with what we do about it, that led to this book. Matt Damon's character, Mark Watney, in the film, The Martian, said: "At some point, everything's gonna go south on you and you're going to say, 'This is it. This is how I end.' Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That's all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem and you solve the next one, and then the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home." That's also how a nation endures.
Life on the Ground – So Little Time
So little time. Try to understand that I'm – trying to make a move just to stay in the game; I try to stay awake and remember my name. Oh, everybody's changing, and I don't feel the same. – Keane, Everybody’s Changing
Remember when we thought we never would survive? But now, neither one of us is breaking. – Roberta Flack, Making Love
As much as perhaps anyone I’ve ever met, Nick Porcelli epitomized diversity and all that’s great about it. I met Nick my third year in New York at a dinner party hosted by a friend from Columbia University. As my friend predicted, Nick and I had much in common, both with respect to life experiences and interests. It was one of those meets where instantly you’re old friends. A combination of Jewish, Italian and Cuban heritage, with the good looks of all three, Nick was a striking figure. Women (and men) constantly flirted with him, and he graciously let them know that he was happily married. “But if I wasn’t…” he’d always add, with a wink that made them blush and sent them on their way, feeling a bit better about themselves. Nick grew up in Chicago’s foster care system and, at eighteen, was out on his own with nothing but his wits and determination to carry him.
And carry him, they did. Through night classes and college, through work as a hospital orderly during the day, and through a range of administration jobs that would ultimately land him as a chief administrator at one of the world’s most prestigious law firms. Nick and his wife would adopt his sister’s two children when they were little more than newborns, and together, they would shower their daughter and son with all the unconditional love and sense of security that Nick’s own growing up lacked.
When he and I got to be friends, he was living and working in NYC during the week and commuting back home to Chicago on weekends. He lived in a tiny (normal, by New York standards) studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen that was warmly decorated and, every time I saw it, absolutely immaculate. Every suit hang the same direction and every shirt, tie and pair of shoes had its place. He also never knew a stranger. I remember on one of his trips back from Chicago, he saw a woman who he thought looked like Roberta Flack seated on the plane. I’d always been a fan, having heard my Aunt Pat, only a decade older than me, listening to her music.
But it was after watching the film, Making Love, and being stunned by her tender delivery of the theme song, that I started collecting all things Roberta. Nick, remembering this, went over and asked this woman if she was Roberta, and when he found out she was, he told her, “I just wanted you to know that my friend loves you and still plays your music all the time.” He came back with an autograph that said, “To Rodney, I understand you’re one of my biggest fans. Thank you. Love, Roberta.”
Nick did everything with purpose. Though I was a couple inches taller, I had to work to keep up with his long strides as we wove our way through busy New York City pedestrian traffic, everyone in a hurry. But then, suddenly, Nick would stop and have a conversation with the homeless veteran on the corner. He knew the man’s name and Nick, shined shoes and handkerchief in pocket, took a moment to acknowledge this man as a human being. “I’ll bring you a plate on my way back,” Nick would say, as we headed out to eat. And he always did.
Nick helped everyone, and he had a real soft spot for the elderly. His life in New York was like a Woody Allen film – full of wonderfully human, undeniably lovable characters; a brilliant intellectual who’d spent most his life in a wheelchair, a middle-aged woman bravely facing down a grave illness, a former Rockette who, though her glory days were behind her, was still a beauty, and so many others, of every ethnicity, gender, sexuality and age imaginable, from exceedingly wealthy to financially destitute.
On the floor of the apartment where I lived was a lovely elderly woman named Sylvia. Whenever she went out, even to the store, she was dressed impeccably. With her lace-trimmed dresses and waistcoat, her gloved hands and pillbox hat, she looked like she was heading out to have tea with Jackie Onassis. Nick saw her out collecting cans one day and mentioned it to me. The next time he came to visit, he insisted that we put together a care package for her with, among other things, bath salts, chocolates, fresh fruit, a bouquet of roses, and $50 he put in an envelope. We arranged it all in a basket and left it secretly by her door.
As my friend, Nick believed in me unequivocally. He’d tell me, “You’re going to change the world, you know that?” and because he believed it, in that moment, I would. Over the years, I’d draw down on this trust more times than I can count. Nick would die suddenly and unexpectedly at just 42 years of age, in 2011, and like the jagged cut it was, the wound of his loss has been slow to heal. But I wouldn’t trade the opportunity to have known him for anything.
You know how we sometimes get stuck on an album, listening to it over and over? For him, that was Keane’s debut release, Hopes and Fears. I remember him playing it, on infinite loop, in his apartment. The fifth song on that album was Everybody’s Changing, and once when it was playing, he volunteered that it was his favorite song. I never asked why and he never elaborated. I think, in part, because it felt like such a vulnerable admission, and partly because it made sense to me. Nick had been making moves to “stay in the game” his entire life, while at the same time, trying to stay awake and remember not just his own name, but those of everyone he’d meet.
Today, when I hear it, or even think of it, I cannot help but also think of my friend Nick. “So little time,” the singer sang; a sentiment that expresses so much of what comes to mind when I think of him – both how little time I’d have him in my life, and how cognizant he was of how little time any of us has. So, Nick lived more fully, more deeply, into every single moment. He savored food, and conversation, and experiences. He took his family on vacation while he could. He extended his hand and walked this earth like every person – no matter how wealthy or poor – was his equal, and he, theirs. Nick savored life.
As a result, Nick’s favorite song has taken on a broader meaning; not just about his life, but all our lives. Increasingly, it reminds me of the reality of change – a truth that Nick’s own life had made him so aware of – and why he lived his life the way he did. Everybody is changing. And if I carry within me one lesson learned from the privilege of having known Nick Porcelli and watching how he lived, it is this: for each of us, our highest and most sacred work is embracing those around us in two equally important ways – celebrating the person they’re in the process of becoming, and cherishing the person they’ve always been.
We’ve Only Just Begun
I still do believe in the bigger table, but it’s more difficult than ever to keep that faith, probably because the resistance to it is so great. We have to be the resistance to that resistance. – Pastor John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table
The point in history at which we stand is full of promise and danger. The world will either move forward toward unity and widely shared prosperity - or it will move apart. – President Franklin D. Roosevelt
“This isn’t the world you wanted,” said Jerome to Charlotte in Westworld’s series finale, “But it’s the world you built”. This quote not only reflects a key insight about the power of human agency, but for me, personally, it speaks to one of my most fervent hopes; that somehow, together, we’ll prove ourselves to be a people whose best days still lie ahead of us. But right now, that’s not the future we’re necessarily creating. Everything from our toxic social climate to our troubled political processes reveals how while this might not be the world we Americans wanted, it’s the one that we, by lives lived and actions taken, have built.
This was a realization we began having as far back as the 60s, when Governor Wallace used his body to prevent University of Alabama’s integration, when live television beamed images of children swept down the streets of downtown Birmingham by fire hoses, and when Troopers charged their horses into marchers on the Edmond Pettus Bridge. The sheer violence brought us face-to-face with the pain of our societal kin, and with our complicity in it. And in doing so, it deprived us of the ability to continue telling ourselves that all was OK. But that’s a tough place to be, so we rewrote the story to be about our dividedness. Instead of victim and attacker, it’s the Hatfields and McCoys; with both parties equally to blame. We couldn’t allow ourselves to see how by hurting them, we’d harmed ourselves, and that same denial made it impossible to fully address the problems our own actions created.
Fast-forward sixty years, and here we are, still talking about our dividedness just like we did back then; like it’s new, sudden, and has nothing to do with our behavior. But the thing is, not only is this narrative false, it isn’t actually new. We’ve been fighting against our better angels since the onset of the Revolution itself, and despite our name, uniting has never been our strong suit. But at our beginning, our hopes burned so much brighter.
All social entities, whether communities or congregations, book clubs or bowling leagues, corporations or civilizations, start out brimming with possibility. “So many roads to choose,” the Carpenters sang in their 70s wedding classic. “We start out walking and learn to run, and yes, we've just begun.” These communities we form and societies we create are buoyed by hope and held aloft by the dreams that called them forth. And that’s where they could remain, thriving and becoming in this Age of Promise. But they rarely stay there for long. Something about our fear of both growth and change tends to foster counter-sustainability among us. The same unknowns that once inspired us become overwhelming. We begin to act out in ways that diminish hopes and sever ties. The roads from which we can choose are fewer and we tire of running. We become realists, pragmatists and cynics. We start to expect less from ourselves and believe the worst in others. And that heralds, for any society, the beginning of the end.
Societies, like everything else, exist in perpetual states of dynamism. The question is not whether they’ll face challenges that could be their undoing. They will, many times over. Whether confronted by rivals, impacted by disease, visited by catastrophe or simply worn down by the sum of their own choices, one thing human history proves is that any society that refuses to change is one that won’t last. “So little time” could just as easily be applied to nations as individuals. And that’s where things get particularly tough. Because, America, like all societies, exists by agreement. Everything from our borders to our determination of who is, and who is not, one of us, is real because we agree that it is. That’s what makes this particular crossing so perilous. We don’t have the hindsight that our posterity, those who will look back and tell our story, will have. What awaits us on the other side of any threshold is unknown. Because it’s not just everybody, as Nick reminded us, who’s changing; but everything; all of existence is both inherently the same and simultaneously becoming something different.
The people that emerges from its crucible will, by definition, be different from the one that entered. But like the butterfly is to the caterpillar, they will also be the same. In that moment of existential crisis, societies either go extinct, or they find that they’ve already developed within them the ability to author their own transformation; emerging as something simultaneously the same and different, and at the same time, better. All of which leads to a question: What if the inevitable demise of society, isn’t? What if the very reason they end is because they insist on never changing? What if what happens next isn’t already written, and that we’re penning it right now – by what we do today? And what if, by embracing certain traits that counteract our own worst tendencies and by committing to the work of forming a more perfect union, a land made for both you and me, we can create societies that adapt, evolve, reinvent themselves, thrive and ultimately, sustain – remaining perpetually in the Age of Promise? We could.
One last thing to remember about societies is that they live because the people who are part of them, believe. We infuse them with love, imbue them with life and nurture them. We sacrifice for their well-being and rally to their defense. We create their institutions and infrastructure and entrust them to act on our behalf. And because we believe, we’re bound to and care deeply for the members of our societal family; both individually and as a collective. When those same people stop believing, those societies begin to die.
The Differentiators – Our Saving Grace
"All the News That’s Fit to Print"
Today is January 16, 2045, and on this momentous celebration of Martin Luther King’s birthday, the United States has reached a milestone of its own – we are now a nation with no ethnic majority. But that’s not all: in the eighty-two years since Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, we’ve shifted dramatically from a society deeply invested in the idea of race, and where over 88% identified as white, to one where an increasing majority of Americans have moved beyond the construct altogether. We simply no longer find that paradigm useful.
But this was only the most obvious of sociocultural changes we’d undergo. Females would cast off eons of subjugation, and males would radically redefine the construct of manhood to include all kinds of qualities that were once disparaged as womanly. Our sexuality-based identities, along with who determined them, would change in ways never imagined, and people of all faiths and non-faiths would make valuable contributions to our moral, ethical and spiritual growth. Even our concepts of beauty, intelligence and the ways we live in relationship would change. Our assumptions about ourselves and one another would evolve, and we’d learn that differences are not disabilities.
But not overnight. The road to here had been a long one. Yet along the way, there were inflection points; from the re-integration of our military (which is where, during the American Revolution, we started) to the ending of slavery, from the first Journey of Reconciliation to women’s and LGBTQ+ rights. But most obvious was the 2008 election of Barack Obama; a moment when a descendant of an enslaved people became head of our nation. Americans from every background, ancestry and state came together to make this milestone, once only a pipe dream, reality. It was so unprecedented that we thought this one act would transport us instantly to the Promised Land. But the journey had just started, and getting there would require our own forty years in the desert.
Over that time, we’d employ tactics we’ve employed repeatedly; using constructed categories to scapegoat our fellow Americans; never realizing that the constructs themselves were falling apart. We’d blame our flailing economy on greater minority visibility and brand LGBTQ equality, “special” rights; just as we’d done in the Civil Rights era. We’d foster the perception that we were being overrun by Muslims, terrorists and “Illegals”; just as we’d done with everyone from Chinese to Jews earlier. We’d lament states’ rights that were being curtailed, but declare human rights abuses acceptable. This land, some would insist, was their land, taken fair and square. But now others were trying to take what God himself had given them, and unless they stood up – right then – and eliminated the threat, all would be lost. And just like that, “one nation, indivisible” would be rendered obsolete. But even this wasn’t new.
Post-Reconstruction era senators, citing the threat of Negro rule, resisted laws that made lynching illegal, and for the first half of the 20th century, we terrorized minority communities; marching with rifles and flags and signs that said, “Jews will not replace us”. In the 1960s, we weaponized sacred texts and conscripted the faithful into the culture war. In the ‘70s, we blamed the push to pay workers a living wage, instead of predatory practices, for a troubled economy. In the ‘80s, we blamed Asian Americans for running Detroit carmakers out of business, and Latinx Americans for taking “our” jobs. We burned dozens of historically black churches across the South in the ‘90s, and after 9/11, targeted Muslim and Middle Eastern Americans.
The 2000s would find us blaming our fragmentation on same-sex marriage instead of on bigotry and human disregard. In the 2010s, we brandished assault weapons at rallies, marching with rifles and flags and signs that said “Black lives don’t matter, and neither do their votes.” Then came the 2020s, with waning majorities, fueled by an almost apocalyptic fervor, re-envisioning our cooperative political process as a holy war and declaring our fellow Americans the enemy. This would almost be the end of us, which is how 2012 - 2032 came to be known as our Time of Turmoil; a reckoning we’d been postponing since our first encounters with indigenous peoples and the three-fifths compromise.
Later, when the dust settled, we’d look back; asking whose fault it was. But in a democracy, rule of the people, we can’t lay problems we, the people, caused at the doorstep of any one person. At every juncture, it was us, the American citizenry, who allowed our unity to be shattered; this time, almost irreparably. Almost. But then, out of the ashes, from the remains of a nation we ourselves had set afire, something beautiful; a unified theory of American culture, would emerge. People of every identity and from every place would begin to grasp what it means to be a new nation, one conceived in liberty, and what that requires of us. We’d banish second-class citizenship. Gender/sexuality diversity would become the norm. Faith groups would become peacemakers. And constructs we’d long thought of as immutable, would evolve.
In the end, we’d discover that this diverse blossoming was exactly what we needed, and where we’d always been headed. It’s who we are; just as much as “land of the free and home of the brave”. But getting here wasn’t easy. We Americans have always undertaken social progress in fits and starts; steps forward and back. The Civil War, Reconstruction, segregation, integration; etc., a cycle on repeat. The downfall of American fascism was no more certain than Hitler’s defeat, and supremacists, with the crowd at their back, were willing to kill for their cause. But others, like the Freedom Riders, were willing to do so much more; they’d die for it.
“It’s gonna happen, Granddaddy,” said Bob Zellner to his Klan grandfather in the 2021 film, Son of the South. “I’ve met the people changing everything and they’re… You can’t stop them. They are tougher, they are stronger, they’re more resilient, and they’re right.” It would be them, those among us with the power to look unflinchingly at America’s faults and still see her beauty, who would turn out to be our saving grace. Relentlessly, they’d challenge us to go forward rather than turn back. To hold fast to the dream and in the spirit of that civil rights anthem, to overcome. Our “manyness” would turn out to be the key to us achieving true “oneness”.
Today is January 16, 2045, and America, despite her fumbles, if not because of them, more than ever, reflects the virtues on which she was founded. Though getting here took three centuries, our direction was set at the very conception of what would become the “United States”, and was invoked in our declaration that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are everyone’s birthright. From the start, we were a nation of strangers who would become family. And we’ve proven time and again that we are at our best when we embrace this unique and powerful heritage. As we celebrate Martin Luther King’s 116th birthday, let us remember that.
Peyton Ellis – The New York Times – January 16, 2045
No Dividing Line
But I am very worried, about the state of the civilization which produced that photograph of the white cop, standing on that Negro woman’s neck in Birmingham. – Lorraine Hansberry, to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, 1963
This land has a story. What role will you play? – Duwamish Tribe, 2023
The future New York Times article above, though obviously fictional, is based on our real history, the choices, both wise and unwise, sustaining and self-destructive, we’ve made and why we made them. It also describes this precarious place in which we Americans currently find ourselves, one where the idea of the union itself is in danger of being felled and we’re the ones holding the ax.
Though perhaps not obvious, early Americans had hit upon a set of ideals that would allow for the envisioning of a new nation. Our critical mistake, however, was not realizing that statements alone aren’t enough; that the society we’ll be tomorrow is a direct outgrowth of the culture we create today. Which is how we became the America Lorraine Hansberry described above.
Right this moment, we, the people, are in the midst of what could be thought of as our nation’s GSS, Great Sociological Shift; one that we’re only partway through. Like the Pilgrims in the mid-Atlantic, we’re too far in to go back, but still a long ways from the other side.
As a result, historic majorities have less than a decade left on the clock; until, say, 2030, when the “brown wave”, just one of the ways Generation Alpha, the first minority-majority, non-racialized, non-genderized, non-heteronormative, non-religionized, fully diversity-embracing birth cohort in human history reaches voting age. And this isn’t just here. Britain is on track to become non-majority by 2055, and others soon thereafter.
As such, incumbent powers can use this time to cement systems that harm minorities (including the ones that they’re becoming), or to strengthen a society where all can thrive; embrace change or fight against ones that have already occurred. At the same time, former minorities, if we’re to become a nation that can endure, must do their own retooling; adopting new framing and resetting, as Pastor John Pavlovitz says, a table where there’s a place for everyone – the kind Martin dreamed of – a “For All” society. That said, this isn’t a systems story. It’s a human one. And if there’s one indispensable fact; it’s that we, collectively, are our societies and our societies are an expression of us. There’s no dividing line; no place where we, as people, end, and where we, as a people, begin. That means that today’s problems are the direct result of an unbroken chain of offenses committed by us, from our colonial days forward; choices to strip some of their humanity, and in the process, doing the same to ourselves.
Throughout this story, our core principles, truths we declared self-evident, are articulated as Diversity, Democracy and Humanity; values held by societies that thrive. This secret sauce was one that colonial America stumbled upon by equal parts happenstance, thoughtfulness and copious borrowing from the rest of the world. They’re what made both the Age of Promise and the dream of America itself possible, so we’ll cover each in depth here at the beginning, touch on them throughout, then, circle back to them at the end.
To help us always keep in mind that our shared journey is, above all else, a human one, interspersed throughout are two kinds of encapsulated stories. You’ve already encountered both. “The Differentiators” (like the future newspaper article which describes how certain socially conscious, spiritually grounded Americans are, and always have been, our saving grace), and “Life on the Ground” vignettes (like the one about my friend Nick), which are pulled from my own life experience combined with real-life events.
This latter group is about those who, despite opposition, made profound contributions to who we are as a people and to our collective story, about those who impeded them, and everything in between. Some remind us that ordinary people really can make extraordinary change; in fact, they are the only ones who do.
Others show us that no matter what we’ve done, that we can learn from our failings, whereas others show us how history will treat us if we fail to learn. “The Differentiators” tell of those who formed the tip of the spear; heroes who, at deep personal cost, and through sheer force of will, forged our collective way forward. Using their difference to make a difference, they demanded that we not do evil toward each other and call it good, and they refused, even when it cost them their lives, to allow us to settle for being less than we could be. “Life on the Ground” vignettes are about people navigating a world where collectively, we’ve often gotten it wrong. “The Differentiators” did whatever was necessary to help us get it right.
”Shall We Play a Game?”
In the 1983 film, War Games, the W.O.P.R. computer, on the verge of launching global thermonuclear Armageddon, learned an important lesson from tic-tac-toe; that the only way to win certain games is by not playing. There’s a similar wisdom at work with respect to our shared culture, and the othering constructs we use to navigate it: we see our mounting problems, but miss how it’s our cultural lens, the way we reject some and embrace others, that drives them. It’s the game we’d be better off not playing. Take race.
We get that it’s a construct that, scientifically, virtually no one believes to be real. Yet, socially, we continue to behave as if it is, and in doing so, we create a society where it is. Part of the problem is linguistic. We have so many overlapping terms and varied meanings that we’re often using the same words, but speaking different languages.
So, before going further, let’s clarify how they’re being used here. Below are five terms that, in this context, might have different meanings than one is used to, followed by three new ideas: the ARC (American Race Construct), racialization and advantagism.
Race -- We can’t begin to understand America without first understanding our most powerful cultural export – the American concept of race. And that’s exactly what race is; an idea that we first created, then treated as if it created us. Think of it as a sorting system, a conceptual tool for categorizing us. But if it’s a tool, we must ask two questions: “Who’s using it?” and “What’s it used for?”
Social frameworks like race are defined (and frequently redefined) by whoever’s in power, based on identifiers of that group’s choosing and in their favor. Society then adopts it as an attribution system for all manner of personal qualities. That part isn’t new. We’ve been doing that for as long as humans have existed. For millennia, we’ve used everything from tribal affiliation to language, from religion to how much facial hair we’ve worn, for these purposes.
But what we Americans did was link race, not to who we are, but to who our great grandparents were. As a sorting system, race can be configured on both ends; what we use as a sorter (physical features, religious heritage, etc.) and the traits we attach to that label (good, pretty and smart or bad, ugly and dumb). And because it’s a cypher, lacking inherent meaning of its own, it’s been used as a stand-in for everything from nationality (the Irish race), to people group (the Aryan race), to ethnicity (the Hispanic race), to gender (the female race), to LGBT people (Inverted race) and persons with Down syndrome (Mongoloid race). It’s been applied to religious heritage (the Jewish race), to class, language, and dialect.
Even up to and through the end of the Great War, the word, a synonym for “variety”, had multiple meanings. But with the ending of slavery and the loss of the slave/free distinction, we needed a new dividing line. In response, race was redefined and elevated, becoming the foundation of American identity. Today, there’s no facet of our society that’s not enmeshed with the concept.
Racism & Bigotry -- Racism is the set of processes we use to extract value and concentrate worth. In other words, it’s a machine; one that’s linked to, but also distinct from race itself. First, we sort people into designated groups. Then, we demote and penalize, subjugate and exploit them, because they’re now part of the very groups to which we’ve assigned them. The process is completely circular. Then, we use everything from propaganda to stereotyping, from segregation to factionalism, to shore up those boundaries we’ve erected; passing them off as something God or nature created. And because we Americans define race solely in terms of color coding, we miss how racism is the gear that turns all forms of discrimination; including across faith, sexuality and gender.
It’s a kind of infrastructure, a technology, even. It’s tactical, rather than personal; driven by what we stand to gain, and feelings of distrust and disdain are how we justify our actions, not what prompts them. Bigotry, on the other hand, is very much personal. This is where our closely held feelings and biases, based on everything from official dogma to ghost stories reside. It springs up in everything from ethnicity, religion and gender, to sexuality, nationality, regionality (e.g. – assumptions about people with Southern accents), and even body size. While one must hold relative social power to wield racism, anyone (and everyone) can be bigoted. For instance, it’s our confusion of racism and racial bigotry that leads us to deny that our actions are racist simply because we don’t harbor personal feelings of ill-will towards others.
But if racism is an advantaging technology, then being racist involves employing it, benefitting from it, and/or validating it; even if simply by accepting that our group is superior. In this sense, it has little to do with harboring hatred or animus toward another group, but rather, engaging in, perpetuating, supporting and benefitting from the system; using it to advance our standing, and its ideology to justify our actions. It’s more about how we behave than what we feel. Now, of course, they’re linked, and one can most certainly drive the other. But a person can harbor strong bigoted feelings while marooned on a deserted island with no possibility of ever acting upon them, whereas a person can be immensely racist (using race technology to one’s benefit and to the detriment of others) without holding a grudge or being fueled by antipathy. This distinction is critically important for two reasons.
First, those of us in the majority are far too quick to declare that we can’t be racist – simply because we have certain friends, have dated a member of a different group, or because we don’t hold people of different identities in poor regard. And usually, we don’t. But we miss all the benefits we derive from racism technology, all the ways it makes the very lives that we lead possible, and, just as importantly, what others have to endure because of it. (This even applies to us nationally, the “American race”, as it were, and how, even when we go abroad, our elevated status shields us and opens doors for us.) By positioning ourselves to derive benefit from the racism machine and supporting policies that entrench it – regardless of how highly we personally view those on the outside – we’re complicit in allowing the system to persist.
But equally important is how those of us in the minority often dismiss valid claims about our injurious behavior on a technicality; insisting that it, by definition, cannot be racist. And again, we’re right. But it’s also a matter of semantics. Just because it’s technically “racial bigotry” and not “racism” doesn’t mean the damage isn’t real or its impact less destructive.
Whiteness -- Prior to the Civil War, whiteness had no real meaning and few people cared. That’s because the dividing line was between slave and free. Slaves were property, not people. But with the Thirteenth Amendment, that line was erased. Everybody was free. And in the aftermath, knowing who was white became not just an economic imperative, but a political one. That led to formulas that ingeniously tied race right back to slavery, where one was deemed white only if all your great grandparents were of European heritage; essentially that none of one’s ancestors at the Revolution could have been slaves.
But the construct’s true power was in how it positioned them. Simply by rebranding themselves, by overwriting nationality with continentality, they’d crafted a political ruling class, and both segregated and elevated the group in the process. Because as anyone who’s ever done laundry can tell you, whites and colors don’t mix. As America’s top tier social status group, whiteness is fungible; a trait that has allowed it to be extended as necessary and beneficial. As such, it’s no coincidence that groups legally classified as non-white were able to upgrade their status starting in the late 1800s; just as freed slaves became eligible to vote. For new entrants, becoming a franchisee was like winning the lottery; it opened all kinds of doors.
Still, it was, by no means, free. Joining meant committing to the cause, speaking the language, and taking up the charge. And that wasn’t all. It required cultural expungement; the severing of all ties with one’s past. We made it practically impossible to be both ethnically European and socially white. Like our transition to bleached flour, the latter replaced the former. Then, there was the oath of allegiance; sworn not to the republic, but to whiteness; vowing to defend it from all enemies; both foreign and domestic. As a result, it would take until after the conclusion of WWI for the idea of racial whiteness to both fully set and emerge as the definition of “American”.
Blackness/Coloreds/People of Color -- The Roaring Twenties would see mass adoption of America’s new racial framework, one that melded disparate European groups into a single powerful franchise; springing from the same ground where slavery once flourished. And just like “slave” and “free”, whites had their own opposite number; first called “colored”, then “Negro”, then “black”. But in the same way that whiteness was contrived, so was blackness.
“There are differences, though,” we often point out, with respect to racial groups. And there are. But those differences are cultural, which is why farmers, regardless of racial identity, will always have more in common with each other than corporate raiders who share their lineage, and why there’s a cultural chasm between black-identifying Americans and African immigrants; despite a common ancestry. But if the construct itself is fabricated, then we get to both choose how we identify and determine what that identification means for us.
Starting in the 1950s, the disenfranchised took up the only strategy they could; they began consolidating power of their own; creating a shared identity, not unlike what Fred Hampton did with the first Rainbow Coalition in 1969. In many ways, terms like “people of color” and “BIPOC” are that movement’s successor. Though BIPOC (“Black, Indigenous + People of Color) is recent framing, the idea itself spans back to our use of “colored” as a catchall for everyone excluded from whiteness. Constructs like this empowered the othered to retell the story and demand their place at the table. They were, at the time, an absolute necessity. But we’re also not the America we were back then, and as our demography shifts, tools that once combatted othering can become agents of it. Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition had room for the white-identifying Young Patriots and their Southern flag.
But today, framing like “BIPOC” excludes only this group; a position that will become increasingly unviable as they become a minority, and as poverty rises across the board. We, the people, have to do better. Because if there’s anything to be learned from the likes of Plessy v Ferguson, and the Indian Removal Act, it’s that harming some of us, no matter the target, hurts all of us.
The Differentiators – The Lovings
Mildred and Richard Loving have always been among my personal heroes; in my mind, just as important to our shared story as Martin or the Kennedy brothers. But they weren’t movers and shakers, politicians or preachers. They were two ordinary people who, simply by finding love and being willing to fight for it, changed the whole of America. Mildred and Richard’s greatest blessing and simultaneous misfortune was finding the love of their lives in each other, but doing so at a time when we were still so fixated on the “races” we’d assigned them that we couldn’t see how compatible these two young people were; how if anyone was perfect for each other, it was them. Richard's father worked for one of the wealthiest men in the county, an African American, for 25 years.
Richard and Mildred grew up in the same small area of Virginia and were part of the same social circle. Richard was best friends with Mildred’s brother, and they, along with a group of friends who the world would describe as interracial, but to them, were just “the guys”, all fixed and raced cars together. They all ate the same regional cuisine, spoke the same dialect, and lived as part of the same relatively isolated community. The boys all ran around as a pack and the girls all laughed at their silliness. Richard and Mildred weren’t trying to make a social statement or even aware they were making one. The lines others considered sacrosanct didn’t even exist for them. They just fell in love.
The last name that Richard had from birth, and that would become Mildred’s, would turn out to be both prophetic and beautifully poetic; the State of Virginia declared their love for each other to be a criminal act. The Lovings would be given a choice; remain with their community, but not together, or stay together and leave the state. Society itself tried to break them, but Richard and Mildred wouldn’t be broken. By taking their fight all the way to the Supreme Court, and winning, they not only paved a way forward for their own family; they reversed a century of legal precedent.
But their greatest legacy is in those who came after them. They are the spiritual Adam and Eve of millions of mixed-heritage, multicultural Americans who have been born since – the Loving Generation – of which so many, from Barack Obama and his sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, to Halle Berry and Tiger Woods, are but a small part.
Between what might be, and what has been, this is the beginning; this is the beginning of the end. – Steve Moakler, Beginning of the End
“I see the bad moon a-rising,” sang Creedence Clearwater Revival’s John Fogerty. “I see trouble on the way. I see earthquakes and lightning,” he continued, “I see bad times today.” That sentiment, captured in one of CCR’s most iconic songs is more than great imagery; it increasingly describes the prevailing perspective of people across our nation.
And that’s the thing — though we might not fully grasp how we ended up here, or clearly see the choices that led us here, at least we’re honest. If there’s one thing we Americans know, it’s how to spot trouble when we see it. But this also isn’t the routine Saturday Night’s Alright (for Fighting) kind of trouble Elton sang about. It’s the kind that, to quote President Lincoln, “Tests whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.”
I fear rivers overflowing. I hear the voice of rage and ruin. Don’t come ‘round tonight. Well, it’s bound to take your life. There’s a bad moon on the rise.
But at the same time, none of this is really new. From the Revolutionary War to the Civil War, from the Great Depression to the tumultuous ‘60s, from the oil crisis in the ‘80s to the Great Recession, from political gamesmanship to social injustice, we, the people, have far more experience with unrest than we do with rest. Despite our prayers for peace, we’re a nation that’s repeatedly declared war on itself. But what might be the most troubling about this kind of trouble is how we end up overlooking a core truth of societies — they start to die the day we decide that some people don’t matter.
Today, getting this right is more important than ever. Because at its core is the cultural equivalent of a 9.0 earthquake – we’re changing in unprecedented ways, but lack the frameworks to survive this new reality. Take the idea of race, the lynchpin of American identity. The abolition of slavery ended a lot more than the institution itself. It abolished the paradigm that made our nation work – the distinction between slave and free – both people and states.
In the vacuum, we invented a replacement framework, one that could take up where slavery left off, and by the late 1800s, it had a name – we called it “whiteness”. Over time, we’d Anglicize and fold over 80 distinct people groups into it, we’d make white status a prerequisite for citizenship, and we’d use that group’s political power to build an American ruling class.
But that time is over. We’re already long past the moment non-Anglo births surpassed Anglo births. In 5 years, that birth cohort reaches voting age, and in just 20, we’ll be a nation with no ethnic majority. Or, take religion, where we’ve gone from forced conversions during slavery to a time when those same groups are shrinking, and where our largest and fastest-growing faith affiliation is “none”.
Then, there’s our shifting understanding of both gender and sexuality. Today, 25% of Generation Y identifies as non-straight (compared to 2.5% of Gen X) and the gender binary, increasingly abandoned – and that’s before getting to the massive majority that now sees marriage as a civil right. All three are examples of how constructs that once alienated the targeted are now isolating those who did the targeting.
Like giant glaciers, our demographic and psychographic mix, the ways we humans classify ourselves, are constantly and inevitably changing. That’s always been the case, from the earliest humans on. The fabricated homogeneity of the United States has always been at odds with reality; a world where the entire European diaspora represents only 10% of humans alive. From the time the Pilgrims landed, this shift was already occurring here.
But recently, everything from international flights to the interconnectivity the internet provides, from the rise of multinational companies to mass migration and culture-blending, we’ve seen an acceleration unlike anything in history. As a result, this non-Euro-centric, multicultural, multinational population where both authoritarian religion and heteronormativity are on the decline is not just humankind’s future. It’s our present.
Finally, there’s us as individuals. We’ve always known that we’re all different, that each of us is an “n” of one. That’s why some of us found it necessary to invent typologies; ones designed to ostensibly bring order to our world. But again, this is where we get it wrong. Those typologies were built to do the exact opposite of what we thought they did, and what we’ve been told that they do. They don't protect us from the “dangerous other”; they’re the mechanism by which the actual othering is done.
They’re the tools that allow differentiated people to declare themselves the same, and in doing so, the new power. So, when supremacists say, "OUR RACE IS OUR NATION," they're essentially rewriting the Constitution; asserting that everywhere that refers to "nation" or “the people” is actually a reference to social whiteness, as defined by them.
Or, take religion. Since our 1954 push to include the phrase “under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance (incidentally, the same year as Brown v. Board), we’ve been dead-set on declaring ourselves not only a Christian nation but a certain kind of Christian; the kind that blessed slavery, honored segregation, and preached the gospel of racial superiority, the kind that believes that only issues impacting a segment of us matter. “There’s a right way and a wrong way, to walk down a lonely highway,” Steve Moakler sang in Beginning of the End, “And I’ve been on both sides of the road.” As have we all.
But this isn’t just about our constructs or institutions, it’s about ourselves. The problem we’re facing is very much a spiritual one; increasingly evident in our inability to connect the dots between individual actions and collective outcomes, between the people we are and the society we have. We’re a nation suffering from three grievous wounds – allowing corrosive constructs to poison our culture (Part One), ignoring how taking advantage of some of us inevitably harms all of us (Part Two), and refusing to see how our individual actions shape our shared destiny (Part Three). We Americans have embraced these malignant practices so thoroughly that, across the board, irrespective of politics or geography, ethnicity or ideology, they’ve become our new normal. But that’s entirely self-defeating. The only thing doubling down on human disregard can succeed at doing is accelerating our descent.
We'll get into why tactics like these worked for a while (as well as why they were always doomed to fail) later. Most important here is understanding that they weren’t handed down from Mount Olympus or Sinai; they were constructed, and that hardly anything in this world is built, whether business or belief system, without an expected return on investment. Which is why we, failing to grasp the severity of our situation, charged ahead; cannibalizing diversity, then, rewriting history to justify what we’d done to our societal kin. But what happens when the minorities are the new majority (or, as Bob Dylan put it, “the slow one will later be fast”)? Because it’s through our doing unto others that we teach others what’s acceptable to do unto us. So, yes, we've seen trouble before. But also not quite like this.
The actual words spoken by astronaut Jack Swigert were, "Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here." And when those supporting the Apollo 13 mission heard them, they leapt into action. The question for those on the ground was not, "Who can we blame for this?" Nor was their focus on who would get credit. They weren't fixated on campaigning; convincing people to back their ideas – even if those ideas were the wrong ones. It was all about solving the problem.
Over this three-part journey, that's our challenge; to revisit and learn from our social history, America's shared story. It's a sense-making endeavor; a delving into the workings of our own hearts, and how we choose a better destiny. The hope is, despite our continual history of so often rendering harm to get ahead, that we can prove that there's far more to us than that. Together, we can embrace a future that includes everyone in "we, the people" and that inspires each of us to “form a more perfect union”. But we only get there by understanding how we got here.
The work before us requires the challenging of an assumption that most of us carry; that there are individuals, and even entire groups, who we believe to be inferior or disposable, worthless or irredeemable, that we’d all be better off without. Or, put another way, the reason they do evil is because they're evil; the reason we do evil is because we made a mistake. But even the most cursory examination of human nature reveals hearts that are capable of both; people who perpetrate the worst crimes against humanity – who commit genocide, or enslave others, who poison children's drinking water or steal old people's retirement – even they have people they love, and whom they’d lay down their lives for. They're not just cardboard villains. They have dreams. They've committed selfless acts of true kindness. Humanity lives in them just as it does in us. It was Marvin Gaye who sang, "We're all sensitive people, with so much to give, since we’ve got to be here, let’s live." And he was right.
So, if humanity is our factory setting, and if we, and the arc of the moral universe "bends toward justice", how did we end up here? That's the question, along with what we do about it, that led to this book. Matt Damon's character, Mark Watney, in the film, The Martian, said: "At some point, everything's gonna go south on you and you're going to say, 'This is it. This is how I end.' Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That's all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem and you solve the next one, and then the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home." That's also how a nation endures.
Life on the Ground – So Little Time
So little time. Try to understand that I'm – trying to make a move just to stay in the game; I try to stay awake and remember my name. Oh, everybody's changing, and I don't feel the same. – Keane, Everybody’s Changing
Remember when we thought we never would survive? But now, neither one of us is breaking. – Roberta Flack, Making Love
As much as perhaps anyone I’ve ever met, Nick Porcelli epitomized diversity and all that’s great about it. I met Nick my third year in New York at a dinner party hosted by a friend from Columbia University. As my friend predicted, Nick and I had much in common, both with respect to life experiences and interests. It was one of those meets where instantly you’re old friends. A combination of Jewish, Italian and Cuban heritage, with the good looks of all three, Nick was a striking figure. Women (and men) constantly flirted with him, and he graciously let them know that he was happily married. “But if I wasn’t…” he’d always add, with a wink that made them blush and sent them on their way, feeling a bit better about themselves. Nick grew up in Chicago’s foster care system and, at eighteen, was out on his own with nothing but his wits and determination to carry him.
And carry him, they did. Through night classes and college, through work as a hospital orderly during the day, and through a range of administration jobs that would ultimately land him as a chief administrator at one of the world’s most prestigious law firms. Nick and his wife would adopt his sister’s two children when they were little more than newborns, and together, they would shower their daughter and son with all the unconditional love and sense of security that Nick’s own growing up lacked.
When he and I got to be friends, he was living and working in NYC during the week and commuting back home to Chicago on weekends. He lived in a tiny (normal, by New York standards) studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen that was warmly decorated and, every time I saw it, absolutely immaculate. Every suit hang the same direction and every shirt, tie and pair of shoes had its place. He also never knew a stranger. I remember on one of his trips back from Chicago, he saw a woman who he thought looked like Roberta Flack seated on the plane. I’d always been a fan, having heard my Aunt Pat, only a decade older than me, listening to her music.
But it was after watching the film, Making Love, and being stunned by her tender delivery of the theme song, that I started collecting all things Roberta. Nick, remembering this, went over and asked this woman if she was Roberta, and when he found out she was, he told her, “I just wanted you to know that my friend loves you and still plays your music all the time.” He came back with an autograph that said, “To Rodney, I understand you’re one of my biggest fans. Thank you. Love, Roberta.”
Nick did everything with purpose. Though I was a couple inches taller, I had to work to keep up with his long strides as we wove our way through busy New York City pedestrian traffic, everyone in a hurry. But then, suddenly, Nick would stop and have a conversation with the homeless veteran on the corner. He knew the man’s name and Nick, shined shoes and handkerchief in pocket, took a moment to acknowledge this man as a human being. “I’ll bring you a plate on my way back,” Nick would say, as we headed out to eat. And he always did.
Nick helped everyone, and he had a real soft spot for the elderly. His life in New York was like a Woody Allen film – full of wonderfully human, undeniably lovable characters; a brilliant intellectual who’d spent most his life in a wheelchair, a middle-aged woman bravely facing down a grave illness, a former Rockette who, though her glory days were behind her, was still a beauty, and so many others, of every ethnicity, gender, sexuality and age imaginable, from exceedingly wealthy to financially destitute.
On the floor of the apartment where I lived was a lovely elderly woman named Sylvia. Whenever she went out, even to the store, she was dressed impeccably. With her lace-trimmed dresses and waistcoat, her gloved hands and pillbox hat, she looked like she was heading out to have tea with Jackie Onassis. Nick saw her out collecting cans one day and mentioned it to me. The next time he came to visit, he insisted that we put together a care package for her with, among other things, bath salts, chocolates, fresh fruit, a bouquet of roses, and $50 he put in an envelope. We arranged it all in a basket and left it secretly by her door.
As my friend, Nick believed in me unequivocally. He’d tell me, “You’re going to change the world, you know that?” and because he believed it, in that moment, I would. Over the years, I’d draw down on this trust more times than I can count. Nick would die suddenly and unexpectedly at just 42 years of age, in 2011, and like the jagged cut it was, the wound of his loss has been slow to heal. But I wouldn’t trade the opportunity to have known him for anything.
You know how we sometimes get stuck on an album, listening to it over and over? For him, that was Keane’s debut release, Hopes and Fears. I remember him playing it, on infinite loop, in his apartment. The fifth song on that album was Everybody’s Changing, and once when it was playing, he volunteered that it was his favorite song. I never asked why and he never elaborated. I think, in part, because it felt like such a vulnerable admission, and partly because it made sense to me. Nick had been making moves to “stay in the game” his entire life, while at the same time, trying to stay awake and remember not just his own name, but those of everyone he’d meet.
Today, when I hear it, or even think of it, I cannot help but also think of my friend Nick. “So little time,” the singer sang; a sentiment that expresses so much of what comes to mind when I think of him – both how little time I’d have him in my life, and how cognizant he was of how little time any of us has. So, Nick lived more fully, more deeply, into every single moment. He savored food, and conversation, and experiences. He took his family on vacation while he could. He extended his hand and walked this earth like every person – no matter how wealthy or poor – was his equal, and he, theirs. Nick savored life.
As a result, Nick’s favorite song has taken on a broader meaning; not just about his life, but all our lives. Increasingly, it reminds me of the reality of change – a truth that Nick’s own life had made him so aware of – and why he lived his life the way he did. Everybody is changing. And if I carry within me one lesson learned from the privilege of having known Nick Porcelli and watching how he lived, it is this: for each of us, our highest and most sacred work is embracing those around us in two equally important ways – celebrating the person they’re in the process of becoming, and cherishing the person they’ve always been.
We’ve Only Just Begun
I still do believe in the bigger table, but it’s more difficult than ever to keep that faith, probably because the resistance to it is so great. We have to be the resistance to that resistance. – Pastor John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table
The point in history at which we stand is full of promise and danger. The world will either move forward toward unity and widely shared prosperity - or it will move apart. – President Franklin D. Roosevelt
“This isn’t the world you wanted,” said Jerome to Charlotte in Westworld’s series finale, “But it’s the world you built”. This quote not only reflects a key insight about the power of human agency, but for me, personally, it speaks to one of my most fervent hopes; that somehow, together, we’ll prove ourselves to be a people whose best days still lie ahead of us. But right now, that’s not the future we’re necessarily creating. Everything from our toxic social climate to our troubled political processes reveals how while this might not be the world we Americans wanted, it’s the one that we, by lives lived and actions taken, have built.
This was a realization we began having as far back as the 60s, when Governor Wallace used his body to prevent University of Alabama’s integration, when live television beamed images of children swept down the streets of downtown Birmingham by fire hoses, and when Troopers charged their horses into marchers on the Edmond Pettus Bridge. The sheer violence brought us face-to-face with the pain of our societal kin, and with our complicity in it. And in doing so, it deprived us of the ability to continue telling ourselves that all was OK. But that’s a tough place to be, so we rewrote the story to be about our dividedness. Instead of victim and attacker, it’s the Hatfields and McCoys; with both parties equally to blame. We couldn’t allow ourselves to see how by hurting them, we’d harmed ourselves, and that same denial made it impossible to fully address the problems our own actions created.
Fast-forward sixty years, and here we are, still talking about our dividedness just like we did back then; like it’s new, sudden, and has nothing to do with our behavior. But the thing is, not only is this narrative false, it isn’t actually new. We’ve been fighting against our better angels since the onset of the Revolution itself, and despite our name, uniting has never been our strong suit. But at our beginning, our hopes burned so much brighter.
All social entities, whether communities or congregations, book clubs or bowling leagues, corporations or civilizations, start out brimming with possibility. “So many roads to choose,” the Carpenters sang in their 70s wedding classic. “We start out walking and learn to run, and yes, we've just begun.” These communities we form and societies we create are buoyed by hope and held aloft by the dreams that called them forth. And that’s where they could remain, thriving and becoming in this Age of Promise. But they rarely stay there for long. Something about our fear of both growth and change tends to foster counter-sustainability among us. The same unknowns that once inspired us become overwhelming. We begin to act out in ways that diminish hopes and sever ties. The roads from which we can choose are fewer and we tire of running. We become realists, pragmatists and cynics. We start to expect less from ourselves and believe the worst in others. And that heralds, for any society, the beginning of the end.
Societies, like everything else, exist in perpetual states of dynamism. The question is not whether they’ll face challenges that could be their undoing. They will, many times over. Whether confronted by rivals, impacted by disease, visited by catastrophe or simply worn down by the sum of their own choices, one thing human history proves is that any society that refuses to change is one that won’t last. “So little time” could just as easily be applied to nations as individuals. And that’s where things get particularly tough. Because, America, like all societies, exists by agreement. Everything from our borders to our determination of who is, and who is not, one of us, is real because we agree that it is. That’s what makes this particular crossing so perilous. We don’t have the hindsight that our posterity, those who will look back and tell our story, will have. What awaits us on the other side of any threshold is unknown. Because it’s not just everybody, as Nick reminded us, who’s changing; but everything; all of existence is both inherently the same and simultaneously becoming something different.
The people that emerges from its crucible will, by definition, be different from the one that entered. But like the butterfly is to the caterpillar, they will also be the same. In that moment of existential crisis, societies either go extinct, or they find that they’ve already developed within them the ability to author their own transformation; emerging as something simultaneously the same and different, and at the same time, better. All of which leads to a question: What if the inevitable demise of society, isn’t? What if the very reason they end is because they insist on never changing? What if what happens next isn’t already written, and that we’re penning it right now – by what we do today? And what if, by embracing certain traits that counteract our own worst tendencies and by committing to the work of forming a more perfect union, a land made for both you and me, we can create societies that adapt, evolve, reinvent themselves, thrive and ultimately, sustain – remaining perpetually in the Age of Promise? We could.
One last thing to remember about societies is that they live because the people who are part of them, believe. We infuse them with love, imbue them with life and nurture them. We sacrifice for their well-being and rally to their defense. We create their institutions and infrastructure and entrust them to act on our behalf. And because we believe, we’re bound to and care deeply for the members of our societal family; both individually and as a collective. When those same people stop believing, those societies begin to die.
The Differentiators – Our Saving Grace
"All the News That’s Fit to Print"
Today is January 16, 2045, and on this momentous celebration of Martin Luther King’s birthday, the United States has reached a milestone of its own – we are now a nation with no ethnic majority. But that’s not all: in the eighty-two years since Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, we’ve shifted dramatically from a society deeply invested in the idea of race, and where over 88% identified as white, to one where an increasing majority of Americans have moved beyond the construct altogether. We simply no longer find that paradigm useful.
But this was only the most obvious of sociocultural changes we’d undergo. Females would cast off eons of subjugation, and males would radically redefine the construct of manhood to include all kinds of qualities that were once disparaged as womanly. Our sexuality-based identities, along with who determined them, would change in ways never imagined, and people of all faiths and non-faiths would make valuable contributions to our moral, ethical and spiritual growth. Even our concepts of beauty, intelligence and the ways we live in relationship would change. Our assumptions about ourselves and one another would evolve, and we’d learn that differences are not disabilities.
But not overnight. The road to here had been a long one. Yet along the way, there were inflection points; from the re-integration of our military (which is where, during the American Revolution, we started) to the ending of slavery, from the first Journey of Reconciliation to women’s and LGBTQ+ rights. But most obvious was the 2008 election of Barack Obama; a moment when a descendant of an enslaved people became head of our nation. Americans from every background, ancestry and state came together to make this milestone, once only a pipe dream, reality. It was so unprecedented that we thought this one act would transport us instantly to the Promised Land. But the journey had just started, and getting there would require our own forty years in the desert.
Over that time, we’d employ tactics we’ve employed repeatedly; using constructed categories to scapegoat our fellow Americans; never realizing that the constructs themselves were falling apart. We’d blame our flailing economy on greater minority visibility and brand LGBTQ equality, “special” rights; just as we’d done in the Civil Rights era. We’d foster the perception that we were being overrun by Muslims, terrorists and “Illegals”; just as we’d done with everyone from Chinese to Jews earlier. We’d lament states’ rights that were being curtailed, but declare human rights abuses acceptable. This land, some would insist, was their land, taken fair and square. But now others were trying to take what God himself had given them, and unless they stood up – right then – and eliminated the threat, all would be lost. And just like that, “one nation, indivisible” would be rendered obsolete. But even this wasn’t new.
Post-Reconstruction era senators, citing the threat of Negro rule, resisted laws that made lynching illegal, and for the first half of the 20th century, we terrorized minority communities; marching with rifles and flags and signs that said, “Jews will not replace us”. In the 1960s, we weaponized sacred texts and conscripted the faithful into the culture war. In the ‘70s, we blamed the push to pay workers a living wage, instead of predatory practices, for a troubled economy. In the ‘80s, we blamed Asian Americans for running Detroit carmakers out of business, and Latinx Americans for taking “our” jobs. We burned dozens of historically black churches across the South in the ‘90s, and after 9/11, targeted Muslim and Middle Eastern Americans.
The 2000s would find us blaming our fragmentation on same-sex marriage instead of on bigotry and human disregard. In the 2010s, we brandished assault weapons at rallies, marching with rifles and flags and signs that said “Black lives don’t matter, and neither do their votes.” Then came the 2020s, with waning majorities, fueled by an almost apocalyptic fervor, re-envisioning our cooperative political process as a holy war and declaring our fellow Americans the enemy. This would almost be the end of us, which is how 2012 - 2032 came to be known as our Time of Turmoil; a reckoning we’d been postponing since our first encounters with indigenous peoples and the three-fifths compromise.
Later, when the dust settled, we’d look back; asking whose fault it was. But in a democracy, rule of the people, we can’t lay problems we, the people, caused at the doorstep of any one person. At every juncture, it was us, the American citizenry, who allowed our unity to be shattered; this time, almost irreparably. Almost. But then, out of the ashes, from the remains of a nation we ourselves had set afire, something beautiful; a unified theory of American culture, would emerge. People of every identity and from every place would begin to grasp what it means to be a new nation, one conceived in liberty, and what that requires of us. We’d banish second-class citizenship. Gender/sexuality diversity would become the norm. Faith groups would become peacemakers. And constructs we’d long thought of as immutable, would evolve.
In the end, we’d discover that this diverse blossoming was exactly what we needed, and where we’d always been headed. It’s who we are; just as much as “land of the free and home of the brave”. But getting here wasn’t easy. We Americans have always undertaken social progress in fits and starts; steps forward and back. The Civil War, Reconstruction, segregation, integration; etc., a cycle on repeat. The downfall of American fascism was no more certain than Hitler’s defeat, and supremacists, with the crowd at their back, were willing to kill for their cause. But others, like the Freedom Riders, were willing to do so much more; they’d die for it.
“It’s gonna happen, Granddaddy,” said Bob Zellner to his Klan grandfather in the 2021 film, Son of the South. “I’ve met the people changing everything and they’re… You can’t stop them. They are tougher, they are stronger, they’re more resilient, and they’re right.” It would be them, those among us with the power to look unflinchingly at America’s faults and still see her beauty, who would turn out to be our saving grace. Relentlessly, they’d challenge us to go forward rather than turn back. To hold fast to the dream and in the spirit of that civil rights anthem, to overcome. Our “manyness” would turn out to be the key to us achieving true “oneness”.
Today is January 16, 2045, and America, despite her fumbles, if not because of them, more than ever, reflects the virtues on which she was founded. Though getting here took three centuries, our direction was set at the very conception of what would become the “United States”, and was invoked in our declaration that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are everyone’s birthright. From the start, we were a nation of strangers who would become family. And we’ve proven time and again that we are at our best when we embrace this unique and powerful heritage. As we celebrate Martin Luther King’s 116th birthday, let us remember that.
Peyton Ellis – The New York Times – January 16, 2045
No Dividing Line
But I am very worried, about the state of the civilization which produced that photograph of the white cop, standing on that Negro woman’s neck in Birmingham. – Lorraine Hansberry, to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, 1963
This land has a story. What role will you play? – Duwamish Tribe, 2023
The future New York Times article above, though obviously fictional, is based on our real history, the choices, both wise and unwise, sustaining and self-destructive, we’ve made and why we made them. It also describes this precarious place in which we Americans currently find ourselves, one where the idea of the union itself is in danger of being felled and we’re the ones holding the ax.
Though perhaps not obvious, early Americans had hit upon a set of ideals that would allow for the envisioning of a new nation. Our critical mistake, however, was not realizing that statements alone aren’t enough; that the society we’ll be tomorrow is a direct outgrowth of the culture we create today. Which is how we became the America Lorraine Hansberry described above.
Right this moment, we, the people, are in the midst of what could be thought of as our nation’s GSS, Great Sociological Shift; one that we’re only partway through. Like the Pilgrims in the mid-Atlantic, we’re too far in to go back, but still a long ways from the other side.
As a result, historic majorities have less than a decade left on the clock; until, say, 2030, when the “brown wave”, just one of the ways Generation Alpha, the first minority-majority, non-racialized, non-genderized, non-heteronormative, non-religionized, fully diversity-embracing birth cohort in human history reaches voting age. And this isn’t just here. Britain is on track to become non-majority by 2055, and others soon thereafter.
As such, incumbent powers can use this time to cement systems that harm minorities (including the ones that they’re becoming), or to strengthen a society where all can thrive; embrace change or fight against ones that have already occurred. At the same time, former minorities, if we’re to become a nation that can endure, must do their own retooling; adopting new framing and resetting, as Pastor John Pavlovitz says, a table where there’s a place for everyone – the kind Martin dreamed of – a “For All” society. That said, this isn’t a systems story. It’s a human one. And if there’s one indispensable fact; it’s that we, collectively, are our societies and our societies are an expression of us. There’s no dividing line; no place where we, as people, end, and where we, as a people, begin. That means that today’s problems are the direct result of an unbroken chain of offenses committed by us, from our colonial days forward; choices to strip some of their humanity, and in the process, doing the same to ourselves.
Throughout this story, our core principles, truths we declared self-evident, are articulated as Diversity, Democracy and Humanity; values held by societies that thrive. This secret sauce was one that colonial America stumbled upon by equal parts happenstance, thoughtfulness and copious borrowing from the rest of the world. They’re what made both the Age of Promise and the dream of America itself possible, so we’ll cover each in depth here at the beginning, touch on them throughout, then, circle back to them at the end.
To help us always keep in mind that our shared journey is, above all else, a human one, interspersed throughout are two kinds of encapsulated stories. You’ve already encountered both. “The Differentiators” (like the future newspaper article which describes how certain socially conscious, spiritually grounded Americans are, and always have been, our saving grace), and “Life on the Ground” vignettes (like the one about my friend Nick), which are pulled from my own life experience combined with real-life events.
This latter group is about those who, despite opposition, made profound contributions to who we are as a people and to our collective story, about those who impeded them, and everything in between. Some remind us that ordinary people really can make extraordinary change; in fact, they are the only ones who do.
Others show us that no matter what we’ve done, that we can learn from our failings, whereas others show us how history will treat us if we fail to learn. “The Differentiators” tell of those who formed the tip of the spear; heroes who, at deep personal cost, and through sheer force of will, forged our collective way forward. Using their difference to make a difference, they demanded that we not do evil toward each other and call it good, and they refused, even when it cost them their lives, to allow us to settle for being less than we could be. “Life on the Ground” vignettes are about people navigating a world where collectively, we’ve often gotten it wrong. “The Differentiators” did whatever was necessary to help us get it right.
”Shall We Play a Game?”
In the 1983 film, War Games, the W.O.P.R. computer, on the verge of launching global thermonuclear Armageddon, learned an important lesson from tic-tac-toe; that the only way to win certain games is by not playing. There’s a similar wisdom at work with respect to our shared culture, and the othering constructs we use to navigate it: we see our mounting problems, but miss how it’s our cultural lens, the way we reject some and embrace others, that drives them. It’s the game we’d be better off not playing. Take race.
We get that it’s a construct that, scientifically, virtually no one believes to be real. Yet, socially, we continue to behave as if it is, and in doing so, we create a society where it is. Part of the problem is linguistic. We have so many overlapping terms and varied meanings that we’re often using the same words, but speaking different languages.
So, before going further, let’s clarify how they’re being used here. Below are five terms that, in this context, might have different meanings than one is used to, followed by three new ideas: the ARC (American Race Construct), racialization and advantagism.
Race -- We can’t begin to understand America without first understanding our most powerful cultural export – the American concept of race. And that’s exactly what race is; an idea that we first created, then treated as if it created us. Think of it as a sorting system, a conceptual tool for categorizing us. But if it’s a tool, we must ask two questions: “Who’s using it?” and “What’s it used for?”
Social frameworks like race are defined (and frequently redefined) by whoever’s in power, based on identifiers of that group’s choosing and in their favor. Society then adopts it as an attribution system for all manner of personal qualities. That part isn’t new. We’ve been doing that for as long as humans have existed. For millennia, we’ve used everything from tribal affiliation to language, from religion to how much facial hair we’ve worn, for these purposes.
But what we Americans did was link race, not to who we are, but to who our great grandparents were. As a sorting system, race can be configured on both ends; what we use as a sorter (physical features, religious heritage, etc.) and the traits we attach to that label (good, pretty and smart or bad, ugly and dumb). And because it’s a cypher, lacking inherent meaning of its own, it’s been used as a stand-in for everything from nationality (the Irish race), to people group (the Aryan race), to ethnicity (the Hispanic race), to gender (the female race), to LGBT people (Inverted race) and persons with Down syndrome (Mongoloid race). It’s been applied to religious heritage (the Jewish race), to class, language, and dialect.
Even up to and through the end of the Great War, the word, a synonym for “variety”, had multiple meanings. But with the ending of slavery and the loss of the slave/free distinction, we needed a new dividing line. In response, race was redefined and elevated, becoming the foundation of American identity. Today, there’s no facet of our society that’s not enmeshed with the concept.
Racism & Bigotry -- Racism is the set of processes we use to extract value and concentrate worth. In other words, it’s a machine; one that’s linked to, but also distinct from race itself. First, we sort people into designated groups. Then, we demote and penalize, subjugate and exploit them, because they’re now part of the very groups to which we’ve assigned them. The process is completely circular. Then, we use everything from propaganda to stereotyping, from segregation to factionalism, to shore up those boundaries we’ve erected; passing them off as something God or nature created. And because we Americans define race solely in terms of color coding, we miss how racism is the gear that turns all forms of discrimination; including across faith, sexuality and gender.
It’s a kind of infrastructure, a technology, even. It’s tactical, rather than personal; driven by what we stand to gain, and feelings of distrust and disdain are how we justify our actions, not what prompts them. Bigotry, on the other hand, is very much personal. This is where our closely held feelings and biases, based on everything from official dogma to ghost stories reside. It springs up in everything from ethnicity, religion and gender, to sexuality, nationality, regionality (e.g. – assumptions about people with Southern accents), and even body size. While one must hold relative social power to wield racism, anyone (and everyone) can be bigoted. For instance, it’s our confusion of racism and racial bigotry that leads us to deny that our actions are racist simply because we don’t harbor personal feelings of ill-will towards others.
But if racism is an advantaging technology, then being racist involves employing it, benefitting from it, and/or validating it; even if simply by accepting that our group is superior. In this sense, it has little to do with harboring hatred or animus toward another group, but rather, engaging in, perpetuating, supporting and benefitting from the system; using it to advance our standing, and its ideology to justify our actions. It’s more about how we behave than what we feel. Now, of course, they’re linked, and one can most certainly drive the other. But a person can harbor strong bigoted feelings while marooned on a deserted island with no possibility of ever acting upon them, whereas a person can be immensely racist (using race technology to one’s benefit and to the detriment of others) without holding a grudge or being fueled by antipathy. This distinction is critically important for two reasons.
First, those of us in the majority are far too quick to declare that we can’t be racist – simply because we have certain friends, have dated a member of a different group, or because we don’t hold people of different identities in poor regard. And usually, we don’t. But we miss all the benefits we derive from racism technology, all the ways it makes the very lives that we lead possible, and, just as importantly, what others have to endure because of it. (This even applies to us nationally, the “American race”, as it were, and how, even when we go abroad, our elevated status shields us and opens doors for us.) By positioning ourselves to derive benefit from the racism machine and supporting policies that entrench it – regardless of how highly we personally view those on the outside – we’re complicit in allowing the system to persist.
But equally important is how those of us in the minority often dismiss valid claims about our injurious behavior on a technicality; insisting that it, by definition, cannot be racist. And again, we’re right. But it’s also a matter of semantics. Just because it’s technically “racial bigotry” and not “racism” doesn’t mean the damage isn’t real or its impact less destructive.
Whiteness -- Prior to the Civil War, whiteness had no real meaning and few people cared. That’s because the dividing line was between slave and free. Slaves were property, not people. But with the Thirteenth Amendment, that line was erased. Everybody was free. And in the aftermath, knowing who was white became not just an economic imperative, but a political one. That led to formulas that ingeniously tied race right back to slavery, where one was deemed white only if all your great grandparents were of European heritage; essentially that none of one’s ancestors at the Revolution could have been slaves.
But the construct’s true power was in how it positioned them. Simply by rebranding themselves, by overwriting nationality with continentality, they’d crafted a political ruling class, and both segregated and elevated the group in the process. Because as anyone who’s ever done laundry can tell you, whites and colors don’t mix. As America’s top tier social status group, whiteness is fungible; a trait that has allowed it to be extended as necessary and beneficial. As such, it’s no coincidence that groups legally classified as non-white were able to upgrade their status starting in the late 1800s; just as freed slaves became eligible to vote. For new entrants, becoming a franchisee was like winning the lottery; it opened all kinds of doors.
Still, it was, by no means, free. Joining meant committing to the cause, speaking the language, and taking up the charge. And that wasn’t all. It required cultural expungement; the severing of all ties with one’s past. We made it practically impossible to be both ethnically European and socially white. Like our transition to bleached flour, the latter replaced the former. Then, there was the oath of allegiance; sworn not to the republic, but to whiteness; vowing to defend it from all enemies; both foreign and domestic. As a result, it would take until after the conclusion of WWI for the idea of racial whiteness to both fully set and emerge as the definition of “American”.
Blackness/Coloreds/People of Color -- The Roaring Twenties would see mass adoption of America’s new racial framework, one that melded disparate European groups into a single powerful franchise; springing from the same ground where slavery once flourished. And just like “slave” and “free”, whites had their own opposite number; first called “colored”, then “Negro”, then “black”. But in the same way that whiteness was contrived, so was blackness.
“There are differences, though,” we often point out, with respect to racial groups. And there are. But those differences are cultural, which is why farmers, regardless of racial identity, will always have more in common with each other than corporate raiders who share their lineage, and why there’s a cultural chasm between black-identifying Americans and African immigrants; despite a common ancestry. But if the construct itself is fabricated, then we get to both choose how we identify and determine what that identification means for us.
Starting in the 1950s, the disenfranchised took up the only strategy they could; they began consolidating power of their own; creating a shared identity, not unlike what Fred Hampton did with the first Rainbow Coalition in 1969. In many ways, terms like “people of color” and “BIPOC” are that movement’s successor. Though BIPOC (“Black, Indigenous + People of Color) is recent framing, the idea itself spans back to our use of “colored” as a catchall for everyone excluded from whiteness. Constructs like this empowered the othered to retell the story and demand their place at the table. They were, at the time, an absolute necessity. But we’re also not the America we were back then, and as our demography shifts, tools that once combatted othering can become agents of it. Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition had room for the white-identifying Young Patriots and their Southern flag.
But today, framing like “BIPOC” excludes only this group; a position that will become increasingly unviable as they become a minority, and as poverty rises across the board. We, the people, have to do better. Because if there’s anything to be learned from the likes of Plessy v Ferguson, and the Indian Removal Act, it’s that harming some of us, no matter the target, hurts all of us.
The Differentiators – The Lovings
Mildred and Richard Loving have always been among my personal heroes; in my mind, just as important to our shared story as Martin or the Kennedy brothers. But they weren’t movers and shakers, politicians or preachers. They were two ordinary people who, simply by finding love and being willing to fight for it, changed the whole of America. Mildred and Richard’s greatest blessing and simultaneous misfortune was finding the love of their lives in each other, but doing so at a time when we were still so fixated on the “races” we’d assigned them that we couldn’t see how compatible these two young people were; how if anyone was perfect for each other, it was them. Richard's father worked for one of the wealthiest men in the county, an African American, for 25 years.
Richard and Mildred grew up in the same small area of Virginia and were part of the same social circle. Richard was best friends with Mildred’s brother, and they, along with a group of friends who the world would describe as interracial, but to them, were just “the guys”, all fixed and raced cars together. They all ate the same regional cuisine, spoke the same dialect, and lived as part of the same relatively isolated community. The boys all ran around as a pack and the girls all laughed at their silliness. Richard and Mildred weren’t trying to make a social statement or even aware they were making one. The lines others considered sacrosanct didn’t even exist for them. They just fell in love.
The last name that Richard had from birth, and that would become Mildred’s, would turn out to be both prophetic and beautifully poetic; the State of Virginia declared their love for each other to be a criminal act. The Lovings would be given a choice; remain with their community, but not together, or stay together and leave the state. Society itself tried to break them, but Richard and Mildred wouldn’t be broken. By taking their fight all the way to the Supreme Court, and winning, they not only paved a way forward for their own family; they reversed a century of legal precedent.
But their greatest legacy is in those who came after them. They are the spiritual Adam and Eve of millions of mixed-heritage, multicultural Americans who have been born since – the Loving Generation – of which so many, from Barack Obama and his sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, to Halle Berry and Tiger Woods, are but a small part.
I. The Three ages (or beginning of the end)
Chapter 2 - A “For All” Society (Age of Promise - Part 1) (expand)
Chapter 2 - A “For All” Society (Age of Promise - Part 1) (expand)
Life on the Ground – Raymond and Luther
I was ten years old when I started working outside the grocery store, loading bags into people’s cars and returning the shopping carts. It was one of those Alabama winter days where a northern front had blown in, bringing with it freezing rain, which made my hands stick painfully to the carts’ metal push bars. I was standing there shivering, with my palms tucked under my armpits, when Raymond, a down-on-his-luck Vietnam vet and with whom I’d shared my lunch a time or two, walked over. He had with him a clean pair of athletic socks, two plastic bags, and two thick rubber bands. He gestured for me to show him my hands. He gave them both a quick, vigorous rub, before fitting each with a sock, covering it in plastic, and securing it with a rubber band. He said it would do a better job of keeping my hands warm than the gloves I’d purchased from the Five and Dime. And he was right.
Years later, I’d think of Raymond immediately, while watching the disaster film Day After Tomorrow. The group is trapped in the New York Public Library with outside temperatures at 150 degrees below zero. But it is homeless Luther – someone who has a PhD in surviving adversity – who makes two suggestions that might have saved their lives. First, it’s him who knows the only real place to find actual food in a massive library (“What about the garbage cans? There's always something to eat in the garbage!”).
And second, as someone who has spent more than one NY winter on the streets, he knows all the tricks; including how wadded up newspaper, stuffed inside their clothes, can help keep them warm. Though we rarely realize it, our social systems, from civilizations to congregations to corporations, are far more fragile than they seem. All of them, like us as individuals, are intertwined and interdependent. We really do need each other, and more importantly, when the chips are down, it is often those we’ve regarded as least that we need most.
Resilience, the internal capacity to persevere despite immense challenges, is one of those things for which there is simply no better teacher than experience. And when things go awry, as they inevitably will, it is people like Raymond and Luther – those who have endured the most – who are also best prepared to survive. In that new reality, they, not we, are the fittest. All three of what’s called the “narrative gospels” in the Christian New Testament recount Jesus as saying some version of “the first shall be last and the last shall be first”. This statement is often thought of as a prophecy, a foretelling of a point in the future when redistributive justice will force the elites to serve and allow the oppressed to be served. But rather than a prediction, this is more likely simply a statement of fact: Those who have been last are far better equipped to survive and thrive when scarcity hits or when change inevitably arrives. When it comes to knowing how to survive chaos, adversity and tragedy, they’re already miles ahead of the game.
Everything changes; including those things on which we have become most dependent to keep our world intact. I’m reminded of another sacred saying from the Hebrew Bible; “The stone the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone…” When things change, as they inevitably will, it is often those we’ve treated as worthless who, all of a sudden, become priceless. It’s certain that we’ll need their help. The question facing us at that time will be whether we, by our actions, have earned it.
Shall We Play a Game? (Continued)
New Term #1: American Race Construct (ARC)
You think that’s air you’re breathing. – Morpheus, to Neo, The Matrix
We know two things about race. First, that it’s not real, that there are no different evolutionary trees, species or subspecies; that we all hail from the same place. And second, that our believing of the lie nearly destroyed us. So, perhaps the best thing we can do is simply, stop – give the word “race” a timeout, and replace it with whatever we really mean; ethnicity or heritage, ancestry or lineage. But doing so is as tough for us as it was for Neo to grasp that the air he thought he was breathing wasn’t real. The same thing applies to the ARC.
As the name denotes, the ARC is our own homegrown social sorting system; one that rose to prominence in post-Reconstruction America. Doing so allowed us to build a caste system, an enduring societal structure where our position is determined by the family we’re born into, in the shadow of equality; sprouting between the cracks of democracy itself. It’s how, in the Gilded Age, industrialists justified the wealth they made off everyone who wasn’t legally white, including the European immigrants who slaved away in Northern factories. This new social structure would, over the next near century, emerge as the dominant sorting and grouping construct of the Western, if not the entire world. But now, the system itself is crumbling, threatening to take every facet of society built upon it with it.
New Term #2: Racialization/Colorization
Racialization is the modification or infusing of something (paradigms, theology, self-perceptions, institutions, systems, protocols, etc.) with race ideology. Racialization can be applied to all kinds of mechanisms that might otherwise have nothing to do with a society’s normal usage of “race”, but can be conscripted, overwritten, and utilized to our advantage/their detriment.
In the same way that Texans can deep fry anything, we Americans have learned to racialize everything; from drinking at a water fountain, to clothing, music, and fashion. Colorization is a specific kind of racialization, where we assign racial colors to some – e.g. – “people of color”, and is how European Americans decolorized themselves to become “white Americans”.
Diversity educator Jane Elliott showed how blue or brown eyes could be colorized, or how wearing a pinned on collar could be racialized. We’ve racialized business models and law-making, our flags and our symbols. Even people can be racialized; something that happens when we adopt and internalize our society’s designated race construct as our social sorting lens; both embracing our own assigned identity and participating in the assignment and attribution of others. Racialization is so engrained in our society that it happens to all of us. It’s how we end up extrapolating – forming an opinion about entire groups based on one encounter – e.g. – the individual who didn’t speak to you means that “abc” people are unfriendly, or declaring that “xyz” people are bad drivers.
I remember returning to Birmingham while in college and being out for a run. An elderly African American man asked me what I was running from, and I told him I was jogging. He gave me a look that communicated he thought I was foolish, before informing me that “black people don’t jog”. Then, there’s me. Despite the work I’ve done in this respect, I still continue to notice times when my own unconscious stereotypes are exposed. I remember, not long ago, watching The Devil to Pay on Netflix and being surprised to discover that Lemon, the Appalachian female protagonist was of African ancestry.
New Term #3: Advantagism
Despite what we’ve been told since we were young, hatred isn’t the root problem. If we’re honest, the reasons we harm people we don’t know are far more pragmatic, from covetousness (we want what they have) to opportunism (we believe we can get away with it). (Think of what we learned from pretty much every episode of The Walking Dead.) When it’s done to us, of course we think it’s personal, but in reality, it almost never is; the justifications and rationalizations come after the fact, not before.
Understanding this is crucial because when we identify the wrong root cause, we diagnose the wrong problem and almost certainly implement the wrong solution. Even people we’d normally think of as racist, homophobic, etc., might, in fact, not be. This can be true even if we’d caught ourselves using an offensive slur. We might indeed be intensely bigoted. But it’s also likely that we’re simply doing what we all learned to do as kids; honing in on that one thing that we know is going to hurt them most. If you had siblings, you know how this works; how to take whatever they were most insecure about and weaponize it. This didn’t mean we hated them or even that we really believed it. We didn’t even need to know what the word meant. What we knew was that it would make them cry.
Those who long for the good old days of America’s segregated past are driven more by a desire to return to a time that was more favorable to them than necessarily less favorable for others. And in this sense, they are, more accurately, “Advantagists” – people willing to take advantage to get ahead. This path, doing harm, then, hardening our hearts in order to cope, is one that most everyone, at one time or another, has chosen. And while this makes for an American story that’s less “black and white”, it’s also more honest; for even the worst things we’ve ever done were often ones we most likely believed, at the time, we had to do. But what we miss is how common this is. It’s not just those on top who take advantage; virtually all of us, when given the opportunity, tend to “strike while the iron is hot”.
It runs the gamut; from selling used cars that don’t run to drug dealing in high-poverty communities, from crypto schemes perpetuated by those who claim they’re different from the banks, but who end up being the same, to pastors who skim from the offering plate, from payday lenders to loan sharking. The core problem with advantagism is that it’s both myopic and widely distributed; a combination that, for any society, makes it incalculably destructive.
Rise of the Alphas
As a biracial, “masc-of-center”, queer, non-binary person who, as a young teen, actually did run off and join the circus, Stormé DeLarverie was constantly confounding constructs. From joining Ringling Brothers as a rider of jumping horses to performing in drag, Stormé, part of the Stonewall Uprising, would spend a lifetime on the front lines; doing everything from leading the Stonewall Veterans Association to organizing street patrols. This dedication and fearlessness earned them the title, “Guardian of the Village”.
We see someone like Stormé, and perhaps find ourselves struggling to make sense of them. But what we must remember is that it’s not Stormé who is confused; it’s us. They’d been doing the work to be their authentic self, to become self-actualized, their whole life.
Psychologist Abraham Maslow described self-actualization as the desire to live into the fullness of who we are. The process is the byproduct of two powerful forces; external influences (how others see us) and our own internal awareness (how we come to see ourselves). This dynamic of negotiating with ourselves (and the self we’d most like to express), with others (and the expressions they’ll allow us to have), and with every construct that social convention thrusts upon us, is one that will continue throughout our lives.
Increasingly, we’re learning to recognize this – the choice of how we identify, and how we allow others to identify us – as an inalienable right. But as with so many other ways we’re changing, we’re only partway there. Whether with respect to culture or gender, aptitude or appearance, we’re still struggling; learning to roll back society’s power to define us, so that we’re empowered to define ourselves. Stormé and so many others were the exceptions in previous generations. But among Generation Alpha, they’d be the rule.
In this sense, the Alphas, simply by existing, might be the antidote to what these corrosive constructs have done to us, and as they rise, they become the counteragent for what those same constructs have done to the world.
DIVERSITY - Sustainable Societies Key Ingredient #1
It’s you I like, it’s not the things you wear, it’s not the way you do your hair. But it's you I like, the way you are right now, the way down deep inside you. Not the things that hide you, not your toys – they’re just beside you. But it's you I like; every part of you. Your skin, your eyes, your feelings, whether old or new. I hope that you'll remember, even when you're feeling blue, that it's you I like, it’s you, yourself. It's you I like. – Fred Rogers, It’s You I Like
Let the generations know that women in uniform also guaranteed our freedom. That our resolve was just as great as the brave men who stood among us. And with victory, our tears fell just as hard. – WWII Veteran, 1LT. Anne Sosh Brehm, Army nurse
America has rarely seen the likes of Pauli Murray. As an African American, she was the granddaughter of a slave and great-granddaughter of a slave owner. As a woman, she was a suffragist, as an activist, she was arrested for not giving up her seat – 15 years before Rosa Parks, and as an attorney, she framed the arguments that both advanced equal rights for women and formed the foundation for Brown v. Board. Thurgood Marshall called her work the “bible of the Civil Rights movement.” She was gender-nonconforming, non-straight, an author, poet and Mademoiselle magazine woman of the year. She was Yale Law School’s first African American Doctor of Juridical Science and the first woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest. Despite being female, an ethnic minority and LGBTQ+, few people have contributed more to the American story. But imagine what she could’ve accomplished in a society where her diversity was treated, not as a liability, but an asset?
Diversity is, in scientific terms, the amount of variance in a set; whether family or community, society or ecosystem. (It’s perhaps because, at a basic level, no two snowflakes are exactly alike that snow is so beautiful.) Those of us fortunate enough to grow up in environments that embrace our uniqueness are reminded, as the Hebrew Psalmist said, that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made”. Or as Mr. Rogers put it, "There is no one exactly like you, never has been, never will be." Then, there’s Lindy in the 1976 film Car Wash who said it this way: “Honey, I'm more man than you'll ever be and more woman than you'll ever get.” And all three, the Psalmist, Lindy and Fred Rogers, were onto something. Studies show that young people who grow up in environments that help them own their diversity and love their authentic selves experience both less psychic dissonance and greater emotional well-being throughout their lives.
Embracing our own diversity also impacts those around us; we grow both in empathy and emotional intelligence. In a 2016 Journal of Cognitive Enhancement article, Dr. Anne Böckler and colleagues revealed how learning to understand ourselves increases our ability to understand others. Other studies show positive relationships between self-acceptance and traits such as resilience, empowerment and agency. In spiritual terms, variations of the Golden Rule (“Put yourself in the place of others and harm none nor have them harmed”) and the Great Commandment (“love your neighbor as yourself”) both rely on this kind of self-awareness. Then, there are the collective benefits.
Each of us, by being unique, contributes to a pool of diversity that enhances thriving for all of us. Yet, our society, and indeed, most every society, has a complicated relationship with diversity. The amount of variance within a population is a reflection of how much individuality we’re allowed to express; how much we’re allowed to differentiate, diverge from the norm, and come into our own. In statistics, populations are often analyzed by the distribution of data in relation to the center. This is called the degree of “variability” in the data set – i.e., how much each score deviates. In a normally distributed bell curve, approximately 68% of scores fall within one “standard deviation”, both higher and lower than the mean (or average). Similarly, 95% of scores are within two standard deviations of the mean, and so forth.
So, what does this mean in English? Take the standard IQ test. The average score is 100 and the standard deviation is 15. If IQ scores are normally distributed, then 68% of test-takers will have scores that fall between 85 and 115. That’s one standard deviation. An additional 27% (or 13.5% in either direction) of scores constitute a second standard deviation. Those test-takers scoring either between 70 – 85 on one end, or between 115 – 130 on the other. This also means that fully 95% of the population has IQ scores that fall between 70 and 130. Of the remaining 5% of outlier scores, 4.7% fall between 55 – 70 or 130 – 145 (three standard deviations), and only 3/10 of 1% of test-takers score lower than 55 or higher than 145; four standard deviations away from the mean.
But this is, in many ways, drastically oversimplified. First, no one truly reflects the mean in every one of our near-infinite qualities, nor would we want to. We all differ in ways that others around us perceive both positively (e.g. – traditional intelligence, athleticism or tallness) and negatively (e.g. – introversion, nonconforming genderized behavior/interests, or disabilities). All of us are outliers in one way or another. Second, there is inherent bias and unreliability built into every instrument or test we devise or measure we make. Think of all the forms of intelligence IQ tests don’t capture. Third, we are, each of us, always in the process of becoming, somewhere between who we were in the past and who we will be in the future. So, while all measurements are a snapshot of a particular moment in time, our lives are more akin to a film reel.
Then, there’s individual complexity; our own unique mix of insights and talents, capabilities and strengths, variations in how we relate and connect, and how our minds and bodies work; all of which are unfolding and adjusting throughout our lives. Together, this results in original snowflakes, unique individuals overflowing with genius, creativity, and a range of extraordinary capabilities. Think of this collection of nuances and differences as our Diversity Profile; a summation of our social selves, one that’s as unique as our fingerprint.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in 2018, touched on how professional diversity was “sorely missing” on the Supreme Court. Specifically, she noted that with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, “We lost our only civil rights lawyer,” and how none of the remaining justices had significant experience in civil rights, criminal defense, immigration, or environmental law. “I do worry that the authorities who are selecting judges are not paying enough attention to that kind of diversity as well,” she said. Her observations are but one example of how, given our constant differentiation, it’s not enough to think of diversity in established terms; we’ll need to continually redefine the definition itself.
Which gets us back to where we often go wrong; all our lives, we’re told that diversity is the culprit, but it isn’t. Our problems lie not in the perceived differences between us and “those people” but in how we’ve falsely convinced ourselves that the members of our assigned group are the same, and what maintaining that perception costs us.
Societies that have turned against diversity become increasingly stratified and stringently structured, with little in the way of ambiguity. Their standard deviations are small and they rigorously penalize those deemed different and cultivate fear of diversity in their kids. This is the primary reason that so many newly minted college students, coming from hometowns where homogeneity was expected and conformity enforced, find themselves singing racist chants (2016) and dressing up in blackface (2019); both of which happened at the University of Oklahoma, my alma mater, where they were captured on videos that were shared worldwide. But it’s the communities that shaped them, and not these 18-19-year-olds, who are truly culpable.
Societies that, on the other hand, readily embrace diversity are wild with life and creativity, beauty and vitality. They are constantly inventing, advancing, and improving. They recognize that the individual freedom to self-differentiate is, collectively, their greatest hope. It’s the secret of a vital society’s success, and learning to embrace it makes them stronger in three powerful ways.
I. Diversity mitigates survival risk. At its most fundamental level, variation produces slight differences across a population, which then increases the odds that some portion will, for instance, survive an epidemic. The same reasons the principle of diversification remains sound advice in the financial world (the more you spread the risk, the less likely your investments will result in financial ruin) are equally applicable to populations and societies. It also increases our chances of finding cures when we need them.
On the fictional television show The Last Ship, an airborne virus spread across the world, nearly exterminating the human race. A single navy crew protects a scientist as she works toward a vaccine. Their lucky break comes when they answer the call of a sole survivor of a boat where all others have died. They discover that the survivor, a poor refugee, has an immune deficiency that made her ill for most of her life, and that this same deficiency made her immune to the effects of the virus. Her blood was the key to finding not only a vaccine but a cure.
A real-life version of this story played out in AIDS research. Scientists discovered that a very small segment of the human population is naturally immune to the virus. Stephen Crohn, a New York artist and gay man, lost his partner to AIDS in 1978; long before we had any idea how HIV was contracted or even what it was. Over the course of decades, Stephen witnessed the deaths of almost everyone he knew. But Stephen never contracted HIV himself. After volunteering for testing to determine what was unique about his biology, doctors discovered that, like the girl in The Last Ship, the very thing we’d normally label a deficiency made him immune. (There’s an important lesson here). In Stephen’s case, it was because one of the two receptors HIV normally uses to enter the cells was truncated. This one discovery unlocked immense insight into the disease, but it didn’t stop there. Years of HIV research laid the groundwork that accelerated our understanding of COVID.
II. Diversity produces powerful alternatives and breakthrough innovation. Apple’s most iconic slogan was, almost certainly, “Think Different.” This idea is at the heart of innovation. But how we think is a direct result of who we are, meaning, the only way to truly think different is to be different; to have had different shaping experiences, backgrounds and genetic mixes, different highlights and disappointments, different cultures and religions, different styles of family and different temperaments. Variations even present themselves among identical twins, who can differ in a multitude of ways, including personality, sexuality and even handedness. Though our collective differences are tiny compared to all we hold in common, they’re also the reason people can be exposed to the same source data, and draw differing conclusions, leading to solutions beyond any one of us.
Hershey’s Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups (“You got chocolate in my peanut butter…”) said it best. The idea was simple; two great tastes accidentally end up together; thereby creating something better than either on their own. (Whether that’s actually the way it happened or not, it’s hard to disagree with the results.) The thing is, from the printing press to the assembly line or the internet, powerful leaps forward almost never happen in a vacuum. They result from the often bracing interactions between two or more diverse thinkers playing off one another. Revolutions, technological or otherwise, are the result of multiple people thinking outside the box, while operating in the same context.
III. Finally, diverse societies are better places to live. We contend with less atmospheric stress, which impacts all aspects of our health and well-being. There’s more grace and less angst, and we encounter less resistance to our individual pursuit of happiness. We’re able to unleash our full creativity on the world and freely think outside our boxes. We’re more inventive and ingenious, productive and passionate, engaged and empowered. We recognize that our uniqueness makes us priceless; not worthless. This is a society that we’re willing to care for, to fight for, and even lay down our lives for.
The Dillingham Flaw
Sociologist Vincent Parrillo, in his book titled Diversity In America, describes a phenomenon he dubs the “Dillingham Flaw”; referencing a 1907 bipartisan presidential commission to study what was thought of as the nation’s “immigration problem”.
Named after its chairman, Sen. William P. Dillingham, findings were heavily influenced by the work of eugenicists like Madison Grant; who not only asserted a racial distinction between “old” and “new” immigrant populations but also that the old immigrant races (note that even in the 1900s, “race” was being applied to groups who traced their lineages to the same place, but who came here, often as little as twenty years earlier) were in danger of being overtaken by inferior ones; including from Southern and Eastern Europe.
A kind of confirmation bias where our group, often unconsciously, over-simplifies, skews, whites out or otherwise misinterprets data about another group to their detriment and to our benefit, the Dillingham Flaw has shaped our telling of America’s history in all manner of ways. Much of our self-understanding has been formed by this lens, including the faulty assertion that we were founded with the intention of being a Christian nation, and our retroactive description of all Europeans as racially “white”; even though that’s not how those same people thought of themselves.
One current example is how we use identifiers. We often refer to Americans of European ancestry by country of origin (German, French, British, etc.), while referring to other groups (African Americans, Asian Americans) by continent. This, despite Europeans being the smallest of these groupings. It was Rose, a New York City nurse from Nigeria, who explained to me that people from the continent of Africa don’t think of themselves as African. “Americans don’t identify as North American,” she said. And you only have three nations. We have 54.” By collapsing these 54 African countries (compared with 44 European countries), into a single label, we dismiss diversity among these peoples. For instance, by 1750, over a hundred African languages were spoken in the “New World”.
Or, take the ways we’ve discounted contributions that don’t fit our narrative, including how few of us are aware that celebrated author Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers; one of the most widely read French authors of all time) and Alexander Pushkin (considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet and founder of modern Russian literature) were both of partial African heritage. Alexandre’s father, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, was the first “person of color” (as we would now erroneously describe him) in the French military to become brigadier general, and the first to become divisional general or general-in-chief of a French army. Though we think of unconscious biases like these as merely theoretical, they have tangible, real-world effect. They inflate one group’s significance and status while diminishing and obscuring others’; resulting in the ongoing impairment of the same societal kin who could be both making us stronger and improving our shared quality of life.
When applied retroactively to the world at the time of the American Revolution, the Dillingham Flaw over-simplifies our demographic history and asserts an inflated sense of sociological homogeneity. Colonial America, for instance, was far more diverse – even by today’s standards – than we give it credit for. Two settlements in particular, right from the beginning, attracted immense diversity; Philadelphia and New York. In 1700 Philadelphia, while English and Welsh were the majority, there were already significant (and growing) populations of Danes, Dutch, Finns, French, Germans, Irish, Scots, and Swedes; plus a range of Indigenous and African peoples. Diversity even existed among those groups themselves. Take German Mennonites, Quakers and Lutherans, who all sought to build separate communities based on their distinct values and priorities.
However, North America’s greatest concentration of diversity, then, as now, was in New Amsterdam; modern-day New York. Eighteen languages were spoken on Manhattan Island as early as 1646. This astonishing diversity was, in large part, due to how colonial America was originally settled. Starting in the 1600s, various European countries competed to be among the first to establish colonies and trade stations around the world. England moved particularly aggressively; annexing lands from Delaware to Cape Cod, and granting land to “proprietors”; people intent on creating communities that reflected their vision of a utopian society. Proprietors, however, found it all but impossible to exert the kind of control they’d originally envisioned. For one thing, attracting settlers to such risky propositions required making concessions, from land grants to self-governance; decisions that would lay the groundwork for the Revolution.
The Fruit of Africa
In a 2013 science journal, Dr. Sydella Blatch, professor of biology at Stevenson University, described how, though we trace the origins of many scientific discoveries to ancient Greece and Rome, that many of these advances were made sometimes thousands of years earlier. In fact, most of us have no real awareness of the many things we’ve learned from these sophisticated, ancient African civilizations, including:
Math - 8,000 years ago, people in what’s now Zaire developed their own number system, as did Yoruba people in present-day Nigeria. The Yoruba system, based on units of 20 instead of 10, made addition, subtraction and multiplication all possible, with certain concepts (like “score” – as in “four score and seven years ago…”) integrated into our system. Mathematicians were capable of predicting the size of floods of the Nile, defined a circle as having 360 degrees and estimated pi at 3.16.
Astronomy - The Dogon (Mali) people’s astronomical expertise included an awareness of Saturn’s rings, Jupiter’s moons, the spiral structure of the Milky Way and the orbit of the Sirius star system. Hundreds of years prior to contact with Europeans, they’d already plotted the Dog Star’s future orbit accurately through the year 1990. (Any escaping slave with this level of knowledge clearly would have had no trouble navigating their way north by constellations.)
Metallurgy/Engineering - Everything from steam engines to metal chisels and saws, copper and iron tools/weapons, nails, glue, as well as carbon steel and bronze weapons, were all in use across the entirety of ancient Africa. Dr. Blatch reports that 2,000 years ago, Tanzanian, Rwandan and Ugandan furnaces were already capable of reaching temperatures of 3272 ºF/1800 ºC; 20 – 25% warmer than Roman furnaces. In addition to the obelisks and more than 80 Egyptian pyramids, by the 12th century, there were hundreds of great cities dotting the continent, including the West African empire of Mali. The city of Timbuktu had palaces, mosques, and universities, and approximately 50,000 residents by the 1500s.
Medicine - Unbelievable to us Americans, African medical practices, prior to the European invasion, were more, rather than less advanced. Some of those practices include the use of plants with salicylic acid for pain (as in aspirin), kaolin for diarrhea (as in Kaopectate), and extracts that were confirmed in the 20th century to kill gram-positive bacteria. According to Dr. Blatch, medical procedures performed in ancient Africa before they were performed in Europe spanned from vaccination, autopsy, and limb traction to bullet removal, skin grafting, filling of dental cavities, installation of false teeth, Caesarean section, anesthesia and tissue cauterization.
Navies - Most of us learn that Europeans were the first to sail to the Americas. However, there is significant evidence, including ancient artwork and cultural artifacts, suggesting that Africans sailed to South America and Asia hundreds of years before Europeans made similar voyages. Many ancient societies in Africa built a variety of boats, including those outfitted with passenger cabins and cooking facilities. Dr. Blatch describes how groups like the Mali and Songhai built 100-foot boats capable of carrying up to 80 tons, including elephants, which as early as the 13th century, were brought back – by boat – from China.
As impressive as this list is, it’s only a partial acknowledgement of the contributions transported Africans made to the nation we’d become. But even a complete one would still be only part of the story. Because Africa’s legacy encompasses far more than those with obvious ancestral ties, it touches everyone whose lineage traces back to mitochondrial Eve, and to the place we’re all from. She’s where we all began and where that which makes us human originated. All of humankind is, at its core, the fruit of Africa.
The Debt We Owe to Asia
One key example of Eurocentric distortion can be seen in how, even today, Westerners categorize the world’s population, and particularly the world’s Asian population. In the 1700s, Asian racial groups represented over 60% of humans on Earth, with China and India alone constituting 36%. Those percentages remain roughly the same today. But watch any sci-fi movie and the humanoid aliens will look like they arrived on the Mayflower.
The Han Chinese are the world's largest single ethnic group and in 2011, they constituted over 19% of the global population. Unbelievably, a segment of the Chinese population, which is a segment of the world’s Asian population, is essentially two times larger than all people of European ancestry worldwide. Despite our downplaying of Asia’s influence on American society, the evidence; from the laborers who literally built so much of America, to the inventions that propelled it forward, proves otherwise. In reality, the debt we owe to Asia is almost incalculable.
Asian Culture - Dennis Carr, Exhibit Curator, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in a 2015 Hyperallergic article titled The Overlooked Asian Influence on Art of the Colonial Americas, described the museum’s new exhibit titled, Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia. On display were over 90 objects collected from North, Central and South America, demonstrating how aesthetics and art traditions of China, Japan, and other Asian countries were already potent influences in the colonial-era Americas.
Examples include porcelain imported to Peru in the 16th century, an Indian embroidered bed cover that arrived in Boston in the 1700s, and a 12-foot Japanese screen entitled The Southern Barbarians Come to Trade, which shows Portuguese traders disembarking in Japan; “Their tight leggings,” according to Carr, “leading up to billowing pants.”
Finds like these revealed how direct trade between the Americas and Asia, something previously thought to have begun in the 19th century, actually dated as far back as the 1500s. “The United States had its own moment of direct trade with Asia just after the American Revolution,” Carr explained, “But in places like Mexico or Brazil, the connection goes back centuries earlier.”
These Asian cultural influences live in virtually everything that is American. American architecture authority, Clay Lancaster, in an academic journal article titled, Japanese Buildings In the United States Before 1900, states: The Japanese elements incorporated in contemporary American dwellings are now so numerous and readily recognized that it is no longer necessary to argue the fact of Far Eastern inspiration. The small home, essentially of wood, in close communion with its setting, having a flexible plan and sliding screen walls, with built-in furniture, restraint of decoration, and quiet color schemes largely achieved by the use of unpainted woods and other natural materials is prevalent throughout America.
Asian Advances - Long before there would be sizeable Asian populations in the colonies, Asia would, through its many inventions and developments, be a major force in shaping America’s course from colony to world power. Ancient China, for instance, already the originator of the Four Great Inventions – paper, the compass, gunpowder and printing – would be the source of others so essential to the United States, that it’s hard to even imagine a “United States” without them. Among those are water wells (as early as 1000 BC), paper currency (900 BC), and the mechanical belt drive, essential to manufacturing (10 BC).
Bombs, cannons, handguns and other gunpowder-related advances, all of which were deployed in the War for Independence, can be traced as far back as 1100 AD, color printing and gas lighting had been invented by the 1300s, smallpox inoculation in the late 900s (some 800 years before Europeans), the kite and the match – both around 500 AD, the oil well in 347 AD, the pinhole camera (470 BC), the wheelbarrow in 100 BC, and the humble toilet paper in 598 AD. In addition, 15th century China was the world's greatest naval power. Under the leadership of Zheng He (pronounced ‘Jung huh’), a eunuch (another example of diversity), the massive ships sailed throughout the Indian Ocean and to Africa, and scholars agree that they easily could have continued on to both Europe and the “New World”. India had a similar global shaping influence, including the inventing dentistry (7,000 BC), water flush toilets, the scale (2,500 BC), cataract surgery (200 AD) and the spinning wheel (500 AD).
Finally, Mesopotamian, Indian and Chinese mathematicians all discovered Pythagoras’ namesake theorem independently, 200 years before him. This is neither an exhaustive list, nor does it take into account the many contributions from other Asian nations, including Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Japan, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Korea and Malaysia.
Asian Immigrants - Though not present in numbers anywhere comparable to their European counterparts, Asian nationalities were present here as early as 1587, when “Luzonians” (modern-day Philippians) landed in Morro Bay (central California) on board a Spanish ship, as well as 1598, after they shipwrecked just off the coast of what is now known as Point Reyes, in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Similarly, people often described as "East Indians" or "Asiatic Indians" are documented as having been part of Jamestown. Research shows that between 1719 and 1725, more than 1,000 Malagasy (Madagascan) slaves were delivered to the Virginia area fifty years before the American Revolution; at that time, a sizeable number. For instance, late-1600s Virginia had an estimated population of 30,000, with only 300 or so Africans and 4,000 indentured Europeans. 1778 would see an influx of Chinese sailors to Hawaii; many of whom would stay, settle down and marry Hawaiian women.
Two years after the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, Chinese sailors aboard the American ship, Pallas, would help sail wares from China to Baltimore. One Baltimore newspaper, seeing this as a direct outgrowth of the vision that fueled the revolution itself, reported: It is no unpleasing Sight to see the crew of this ship, Chinese, Malays, Japanese and Moors… employed together as brethren; it is thus Commerce binds and unites all the Nations of the Globe with a golden Chain. Filipino fishermen from Louisiana would serve under General Andrew Jackson in the War of 1812, and as artillery gunners in the Battle of New Orleans. But it was in the early 1800s that immigration from Asian nations would truly hit its stride.
Chinese (mostly merchants, sailors, and students), had begun arriving via Sino-US maritime trade, and by the 1850s, young, single Asian men, recruited as miners, railroad builders, farmers, factory workers, and fishermen, would shoulder responsibility for building much of our infrastructure. By 1870, Chinese immigrants would comprise 20% of California's labor force, but less than .001% of the US population. As the 1870s depression ensued, we resorted to scapegoating, and this tiny Chinese fragment became our target. Extreme, anti-Chinese sentiment, fomented by people like Denis Kearney, founder of the Workingman’s Party and by California Governor, John Bigler, would lead to the persecution of Chinese workers for economic conditions they neither created, nor had the means of creating.
This wave of racial bigotry, summed up in the slogan, “The Chinese Must Go,” would result in a rash of riots against Asian immigrants, ultimately resulting in the Chinese Exclusion Act; the only federal law explicitly designed to prevent immigration and naturalization on the basis of racial identity, and that would go on to restrict Chinese migration for the next sixty years; declining from 39,500 in 1882, to only 10 (no, that’s not a typo – only ten people) by 1887 – five years later. As expected, however, the banning of Chinese workers only hurt production and industry, which, in turn, led to the heavy recruitment of young Japanese and other Asian laborers.
Instead of learning our lesson, we repeated it, turning our nativist ire against these new immigrants; a sentiment that was pervasive across the United States. On the east coast, Europeans, because they weren’t born here, were declared non-Americans by people often from the same place, but who lay claim to the title simply because they’d caught an earlier boat. Japanese immigration would thus be curtailed by mutual agreement between Japan and the US, followed by the recruitment of South Asian Indian immigrants; including thousands of Sikhs from the Punjabi region, recruited to work on the railroad. Despite being a monotheistic religion, these same Sikhists (from “disciple”, “seeker”, or “learner”), people we’d enticed here, would embarrassingly be misnamed the "Hindu invasion".
The "tide of the Turbans" would be outlawed in 1917, with Congress declaring that India should also be included in what was referred to at the time as the “Pacific-Barred Zone”, a list of excluded Asian countries. This push and pull would continue with other Asian groups, for instance, with Filipino nationals – wash, rinse, repeat – and including the mass internment of Americans of Japanese descent.
A Land for All
We like to think of America as a national equivalent of Athena, who sprang from Zeus’ head, full grown. But we didn’t come to be in a vacuum. We were contextualized in the world that existed at that time, and in the process, absorbed all the good things that the global human family had to offer. This exploration of America’s Asian and African roots could have been done for any group, from Natives, Latinx, and the most obscure European tribes, to South and Central Americans, Arabs and Middle Easterners, and across vast ethnicities; all of whom made invaluable contributions to who we are. That’s because despite both rejection and persecution, they’d bring with them advances and discoveries, skills and know-how, heart and soul. Together, they’d make the dream of America – to be a “For All” society – real. And in doing so, they’d do far more than help build a nation; they’d transform it.
Life on the Ground – Angel Island
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand, A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name? Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome… The New Colossus, Emma Lazarus – 1903
When I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, taking the ferry out to Angel Island for a day of bike riding and picnicking was a common pastime. The views from out there in the middle of a sailboat-laden bay, off the coast of what might be the world’s most beautiful city, with Marin, the East Bay, the Bay Bridge, the Golden Gate and the mouth of the Pacific in the background is utterly breathtaking. From the top of Mount Livermore, one can see everything from Belvedere Island to the Santa Cruz Mountains. No one I knew, however, realized what an unpleasant place Angel Island, at one time, had been. Though virtually every American is familiar with Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, few realize that Angel Island, a comparable processing center for the West Coast, was in many ways its inverse; the site where immigration policy was enforced, particularly against Asian immigrants. In that sense, San Francisco’s Angel Island represents an important counterpoint to New York’s Ellis Island.
On the east coast, we said to Europe, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” But on the west coast, our message to Asia was decidedly different. Hopeful Chinese, detained at Angel Island between 1910 and 1940, were forced to undergo dehumanizing medical examinations not dissimilar to those that would be imposed in Germany against Jews, gays and gypsies a few years later, as well as endure interrogations involving obscure questions such as, "Who lived in the third house of the second row of your village?" Answers deemed inadequate or inappropriate resulted in either continued detainment or even deportation. In 1970, a park ranger would be the first to discover sets of Chinese characters carved into the wooden walls of the barracks. Now recognized as a historic landmark, the Angel Island detention center bears witness to the pain and heartbreak of excluded Chinese immigrants who carved more than one hundred such poems into those walls.
Learning about this would affect me profoundly. Because I’d seen in the lives of so many others, from African Americans in Birmingham, to Native Americans in Oklahoma, to the LGBTQ+ community in San Francisco, what this kind of spiritual wounding, this discounting of another’s worth and denial of their humanity could do. I couldn’t undo what was done on Angel Island. But what I could do was quit being part of the problem. I could stop doing to others, in this case, Americans of Asian descent, what I’d found painful when done to me; those refusals to see me as a person and treat me as an individual.
When I’d go to the Asian market to buy genmaicha, I’d make eye contact with the clerk, smile, and say thank you. When the Thai couple showed up at our church, I made sure to greet them and get to know them. It took all of 45 seconds for the husband and me to realize that we were both sci-fi buffs. And when Jin, my next-door neighbor who spoke no English when she arrived in NY to spend a semester at Columbia, knocked on my door because she couldn’t get her key to work, we became friends. When her parents visited, I invited them all over for “American chili” (which they loved), and her parents offered to pay for me to come visit them in China.
I’d discover that any two people can find points of connection if only they’re willing to look. These types of efforts might not seem like much. But I believe they matter. Because I know that every time someone has looked past a label assigned to me and seen me as a person, I’ve experienced a bit of healing. It’s my hope that I too can do that for others, including descendants of those we interned on Angel Island.
I was ten years old when I started working outside the grocery store, loading bags into people’s cars and returning the shopping carts. It was one of those Alabama winter days where a northern front had blown in, bringing with it freezing rain, which made my hands stick painfully to the carts’ metal push bars. I was standing there shivering, with my palms tucked under my armpits, when Raymond, a down-on-his-luck Vietnam vet and with whom I’d shared my lunch a time or two, walked over. He had with him a clean pair of athletic socks, two plastic bags, and two thick rubber bands. He gestured for me to show him my hands. He gave them both a quick, vigorous rub, before fitting each with a sock, covering it in plastic, and securing it with a rubber band. He said it would do a better job of keeping my hands warm than the gloves I’d purchased from the Five and Dime. And he was right.
Years later, I’d think of Raymond immediately, while watching the disaster film Day After Tomorrow. The group is trapped in the New York Public Library with outside temperatures at 150 degrees below zero. But it is homeless Luther – someone who has a PhD in surviving adversity – who makes two suggestions that might have saved their lives. First, it’s him who knows the only real place to find actual food in a massive library (“What about the garbage cans? There's always something to eat in the garbage!”).
And second, as someone who has spent more than one NY winter on the streets, he knows all the tricks; including how wadded up newspaper, stuffed inside their clothes, can help keep them warm. Though we rarely realize it, our social systems, from civilizations to congregations to corporations, are far more fragile than they seem. All of them, like us as individuals, are intertwined and interdependent. We really do need each other, and more importantly, when the chips are down, it is often those we’ve regarded as least that we need most.
Resilience, the internal capacity to persevere despite immense challenges, is one of those things for which there is simply no better teacher than experience. And when things go awry, as they inevitably will, it is people like Raymond and Luther – those who have endured the most – who are also best prepared to survive. In that new reality, they, not we, are the fittest. All three of what’s called the “narrative gospels” in the Christian New Testament recount Jesus as saying some version of “the first shall be last and the last shall be first”. This statement is often thought of as a prophecy, a foretelling of a point in the future when redistributive justice will force the elites to serve and allow the oppressed to be served. But rather than a prediction, this is more likely simply a statement of fact: Those who have been last are far better equipped to survive and thrive when scarcity hits or when change inevitably arrives. When it comes to knowing how to survive chaos, adversity and tragedy, they’re already miles ahead of the game.
Everything changes; including those things on which we have become most dependent to keep our world intact. I’m reminded of another sacred saying from the Hebrew Bible; “The stone the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone…” When things change, as they inevitably will, it is often those we’ve treated as worthless who, all of a sudden, become priceless. It’s certain that we’ll need their help. The question facing us at that time will be whether we, by our actions, have earned it.
Shall We Play a Game? (Continued)
New Term #1: American Race Construct (ARC)
You think that’s air you’re breathing. – Morpheus, to Neo, The Matrix
We know two things about race. First, that it’s not real, that there are no different evolutionary trees, species or subspecies; that we all hail from the same place. And second, that our believing of the lie nearly destroyed us. So, perhaps the best thing we can do is simply, stop – give the word “race” a timeout, and replace it with whatever we really mean; ethnicity or heritage, ancestry or lineage. But doing so is as tough for us as it was for Neo to grasp that the air he thought he was breathing wasn’t real. The same thing applies to the ARC.
As the name denotes, the ARC is our own homegrown social sorting system; one that rose to prominence in post-Reconstruction America. Doing so allowed us to build a caste system, an enduring societal structure where our position is determined by the family we’re born into, in the shadow of equality; sprouting between the cracks of democracy itself. It’s how, in the Gilded Age, industrialists justified the wealth they made off everyone who wasn’t legally white, including the European immigrants who slaved away in Northern factories. This new social structure would, over the next near century, emerge as the dominant sorting and grouping construct of the Western, if not the entire world. But now, the system itself is crumbling, threatening to take every facet of society built upon it with it.
New Term #2: Racialization/Colorization
Racialization is the modification or infusing of something (paradigms, theology, self-perceptions, institutions, systems, protocols, etc.) with race ideology. Racialization can be applied to all kinds of mechanisms that might otherwise have nothing to do with a society’s normal usage of “race”, but can be conscripted, overwritten, and utilized to our advantage/their detriment.
In the same way that Texans can deep fry anything, we Americans have learned to racialize everything; from drinking at a water fountain, to clothing, music, and fashion. Colorization is a specific kind of racialization, where we assign racial colors to some – e.g. – “people of color”, and is how European Americans decolorized themselves to become “white Americans”.
Diversity educator Jane Elliott showed how blue or brown eyes could be colorized, or how wearing a pinned on collar could be racialized. We’ve racialized business models and law-making, our flags and our symbols. Even people can be racialized; something that happens when we adopt and internalize our society’s designated race construct as our social sorting lens; both embracing our own assigned identity and participating in the assignment and attribution of others. Racialization is so engrained in our society that it happens to all of us. It’s how we end up extrapolating – forming an opinion about entire groups based on one encounter – e.g. – the individual who didn’t speak to you means that “abc” people are unfriendly, or declaring that “xyz” people are bad drivers.
I remember returning to Birmingham while in college and being out for a run. An elderly African American man asked me what I was running from, and I told him I was jogging. He gave me a look that communicated he thought I was foolish, before informing me that “black people don’t jog”. Then, there’s me. Despite the work I’ve done in this respect, I still continue to notice times when my own unconscious stereotypes are exposed. I remember, not long ago, watching The Devil to Pay on Netflix and being surprised to discover that Lemon, the Appalachian female protagonist was of African ancestry.
New Term #3: Advantagism
Despite what we’ve been told since we were young, hatred isn’t the root problem. If we’re honest, the reasons we harm people we don’t know are far more pragmatic, from covetousness (we want what they have) to opportunism (we believe we can get away with it). (Think of what we learned from pretty much every episode of The Walking Dead.) When it’s done to us, of course we think it’s personal, but in reality, it almost never is; the justifications and rationalizations come after the fact, not before.
Understanding this is crucial because when we identify the wrong root cause, we diagnose the wrong problem and almost certainly implement the wrong solution. Even people we’d normally think of as racist, homophobic, etc., might, in fact, not be. This can be true even if we’d caught ourselves using an offensive slur. We might indeed be intensely bigoted. But it’s also likely that we’re simply doing what we all learned to do as kids; honing in on that one thing that we know is going to hurt them most. If you had siblings, you know how this works; how to take whatever they were most insecure about and weaponize it. This didn’t mean we hated them or even that we really believed it. We didn’t even need to know what the word meant. What we knew was that it would make them cry.
Those who long for the good old days of America’s segregated past are driven more by a desire to return to a time that was more favorable to them than necessarily less favorable for others. And in this sense, they are, more accurately, “Advantagists” – people willing to take advantage to get ahead. This path, doing harm, then, hardening our hearts in order to cope, is one that most everyone, at one time or another, has chosen. And while this makes for an American story that’s less “black and white”, it’s also more honest; for even the worst things we’ve ever done were often ones we most likely believed, at the time, we had to do. But what we miss is how common this is. It’s not just those on top who take advantage; virtually all of us, when given the opportunity, tend to “strike while the iron is hot”.
It runs the gamut; from selling used cars that don’t run to drug dealing in high-poverty communities, from crypto schemes perpetuated by those who claim they’re different from the banks, but who end up being the same, to pastors who skim from the offering plate, from payday lenders to loan sharking. The core problem with advantagism is that it’s both myopic and widely distributed; a combination that, for any society, makes it incalculably destructive.
Rise of the Alphas
As a biracial, “masc-of-center”, queer, non-binary person who, as a young teen, actually did run off and join the circus, Stormé DeLarverie was constantly confounding constructs. From joining Ringling Brothers as a rider of jumping horses to performing in drag, Stormé, part of the Stonewall Uprising, would spend a lifetime on the front lines; doing everything from leading the Stonewall Veterans Association to organizing street patrols. This dedication and fearlessness earned them the title, “Guardian of the Village”.
We see someone like Stormé, and perhaps find ourselves struggling to make sense of them. But what we must remember is that it’s not Stormé who is confused; it’s us. They’d been doing the work to be their authentic self, to become self-actualized, their whole life.
Psychologist Abraham Maslow described self-actualization as the desire to live into the fullness of who we are. The process is the byproduct of two powerful forces; external influences (how others see us) and our own internal awareness (how we come to see ourselves). This dynamic of negotiating with ourselves (and the self we’d most like to express), with others (and the expressions they’ll allow us to have), and with every construct that social convention thrusts upon us, is one that will continue throughout our lives.
Increasingly, we’re learning to recognize this – the choice of how we identify, and how we allow others to identify us – as an inalienable right. But as with so many other ways we’re changing, we’re only partway there. Whether with respect to culture or gender, aptitude or appearance, we’re still struggling; learning to roll back society’s power to define us, so that we’re empowered to define ourselves. Stormé and so many others were the exceptions in previous generations. But among Generation Alpha, they’d be the rule.
In this sense, the Alphas, simply by existing, might be the antidote to what these corrosive constructs have done to us, and as they rise, they become the counteragent for what those same constructs have done to the world.
DIVERSITY - Sustainable Societies Key Ingredient #1
It’s you I like, it’s not the things you wear, it’s not the way you do your hair. But it's you I like, the way you are right now, the way down deep inside you. Not the things that hide you, not your toys – they’re just beside you. But it's you I like; every part of you. Your skin, your eyes, your feelings, whether old or new. I hope that you'll remember, even when you're feeling blue, that it's you I like, it’s you, yourself. It's you I like. – Fred Rogers, It’s You I Like
Let the generations know that women in uniform also guaranteed our freedom. That our resolve was just as great as the brave men who stood among us. And with victory, our tears fell just as hard. – WWII Veteran, 1LT. Anne Sosh Brehm, Army nurse
America has rarely seen the likes of Pauli Murray. As an African American, she was the granddaughter of a slave and great-granddaughter of a slave owner. As a woman, she was a suffragist, as an activist, she was arrested for not giving up her seat – 15 years before Rosa Parks, and as an attorney, she framed the arguments that both advanced equal rights for women and formed the foundation for Brown v. Board. Thurgood Marshall called her work the “bible of the Civil Rights movement.” She was gender-nonconforming, non-straight, an author, poet and Mademoiselle magazine woman of the year. She was Yale Law School’s first African American Doctor of Juridical Science and the first woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest. Despite being female, an ethnic minority and LGBTQ+, few people have contributed more to the American story. But imagine what she could’ve accomplished in a society where her diversity was treated, not as a liability, but an asset?
Diversity is, in scientific terms, the amount of variance in a set; whether family or community, society or ecosystem. (It’s perhaps because, at a basic level, no two snowflakes are exactly alike that snow is so beautiful.) Those of us fortunate enough to grow up in environments that embrace our uniqueness are reminded, as the Hebrew Psalmist said, that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made”. Or as Mr. Rogers put it, "There is no one exactly like you, never has been, never will be." Then, there’s Lindy in the 1976 film Car Wash who said it this way: “Honey, I'm more man than you'll ever be and more woman than you'll ever get.” And all three, the Psalmist, Lindy and Fred Rogers, were onto something. Studies show that young people who grow up in environments that help them own their diversity and love their authentic selves experience both less psychic dissonance and greater emotional well-being throughout their lives.
Embracing our own diversity also impacts those around us; we grow both in empathy and emotional intelligence. In a 2016 Journal of Cognitive Enhancement article, Dr. Anne Böckler and colleagues revealed how learning to understand ourselves increases our ability to understand others. Other studies show positive relationships between self-acceptance and traits such as resilience, empowerment and agency. In spiritual terms, variations of the Golden Rule (“Put yourself in the place of others and harm none nor have them harmed”) and the Great Commandment (“love your neighbor as yourself”) both rely on this kind of self-awareness. Then, there are the collective benefits.
Each of us, by being unique, contributes to a pool of diversity that enhances thriving for all of us. Yet, our society, and indeed, most every society, has a complicated relationship with diversity. The amount of variance within a population is a reflection of how much individuality we’re allowed to express; how much we’re allowed to differentiate, diverge from the norm, and come into our own. In statistics, populations are often analyzed by the distribution of data in relation to the center. This is called the degree of “variability” in the data set – i.e., how much each score deviates. In a normally distributed bell curve, approximately 68% of scores fall within one “standard deviation”, both higher and lower than the mean (or average). Similarly, 95% of scores are within two standard deviations of the mean, and so forth.
So, what does this mean in English? Take the standard IQ test. The average score is 100 and the standard deviation is 15. If IQ scores are normally distributed, then 68% of test-takers will have scores that fall between 85 and 115. That’s one standard deviation. An additional 27% (or 13.5% in either direction) of scores constitute a second standard deviation. Those test-takers scoring either between 70 – 85 on one end, or between 115 – 130 on the other. This also means that fully 95% of the population has IQ scores that fall between 70 and 130. Of the remaining 5% of outlier scores, 4.7% fall between 55 – 70 or 130 – 145 (three standard deviations), and only 3/10 of 1% of test-takers score lower than 55 or higher than 145; four standard deviations away from the mean.
But this is, in many ways, drastically oversimplified. First, no one truly reflects the mean in every one of our near-infinite qualities, nor would we want to. We all differ in ways that others around us perceive both positively (e.g. – traditional intelligence, athleticism or tallness) and negatively (e.g. – introversion, nonconforming genderized behavior/interests, or disabilities). All of us are outliers in one way or another. Second, there is inherent bias and unreliability built into every instrument or test we devise or measure we make. Think of all the forms of intelligence IQ tests don’t capture. Third, we are, each of us, always in the process of becoming, somewhere between who we were in the past and who we will be in the future. So, while all measurements are a snapshot of a particular moment in time, our lives are more akin to a film reel.
Then, there’s individual complexity; our own unique mix of insights and talents, capabilities and strengths, variations in how we relate and connect, and how our minds and bodies work; all of which are unfolding and adjusting throughout our lives. Together, this results in original snowflakes, unique individuals overflowing with genius, creativity, and a range of extraordinary capabilities. Think of this collection of nuances and differences as our Diversity Profile; a summation of our social selves, one that’s as unique as our fingerprint.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in 2018, touched on how professional diversity was “sorely missing” on the Supreme Court. Specifically, she noted that with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, “We lost our only civil rights lawyer,” and how none of the remaining justices had significant experience in civil rights, criminal defense, immigration, or environmental law. “I do worry that the authorities who are selecting judges are not paying enough attention to that kind of diversity as well,” she said. Her observations are but one example of how, given our constant differentiation, it’s not enough to think of diversity in established terms; we’ll need to continually redefine the definition itself.
Which gets us back to where we often go wrong; all our lives, we’re told that diversity is the culprit, but it isn’t. Our problems lie not in the perceived differences between us and “those people” but in how we’ve falsely convinced ourselves that the members of our assigned group are the same, and what maintaining that perception costs us.
Societies that have turned against diversity become increasingly stratified and stringently structured, with little in the way of ambiguity. Their standard deviations are small and they rigorously penalize those deemed different and cultivate fear of diversity in their kids. This is the primary reason that so many newly minted college students, coming from hometowns where homogeneity was expected and conformity enforced, find themselves singing racist chants (2016) and dressing up in blackface (2019); both of which happened at the University of Oklahoma, my alma mater, where they were captured on videos that were shared worldwide. But it’s the communities that shaped them, and not these 18-19-year-olds, who are truly culpable.
Societies that, on the other hand, readily embrace diversity are wild with life and creativity, beauty and vitality. They are constantly inventing, advancing, and improving. They recognize that the individual freedom to self-differentiate is, collectively, their greatest hope. It’s the secret of a vital society’s success, and learning to embrace it makes them stronger in three powerful ways.
I. Diversity mitigates survival risk. At its most fundamental level, variation produces slight differences across a population, which then increases the odds that some portion will, for instance, survive an epidemic. The same reasons the principle of diversification remains sound advice in the financial world (the more you spread the risk, the less likely your investments will result in financial ruin) are equally applicable to populations and societies. It also increases our chances of finding cures when we need them.
On the fictional television show The Last Ship, an airborne virus spread across the world, nearly exterminating the human race. A single navy crew protects a scientist as she works toward a vaccine. Their lucky break comes when they answer the call of a sole survivor of a boat where all others have died. They discover that the survivor, a poor refugee, has an immune deficiency that made her ill for most of her life, and that this same deficiency made her immune to the effects of the virus. Her blood was the key to finding not only a vaccine but a cure.
A real-life version of this story played out in AIDS research. Scientists discovered that a very small segment of the human population is naturally immune to the virus. Stephen Crohn, a New York artist and gay man, lost his partner to AIDS in 1978; long before we had any idea how HIV was contracted or even what it was. Over the course of decades, Stephen witnessed the deaths of almost everyone he knew. But Stephen never contracted HIV himself. After volunteering for testing to determine what was unique about his biology, doctors discovered that, like the girl in The Last Ship, the very thing we’d normally label a deficiency made him immune. (There’s an important lesson here). In Stephen’s case, it was because one of the two receptors HIV normally uses to enter the cells was truncated. This one discovery unlocked immense insight into the disease, but it didn’t stop there. Years of HIV research laid the groundwork that accelerated our understanding of COVID.
II. Diversity produces powerful alternatives and breakthrough innovation. Apple’s most iconic slogan was, almost certainly, “Think Different.” This idea is at the heart of innovation. But how we think is a direct result of who we are, meaning, the only way to truly think different is to be different; to have had different shaping experiences, backgrounds and genetic mixes, different highlights and disappointments, different cultures and religions, different styles of family and different temperaments. Variations even present themselves among identical twins, who can differ in a multitude of ways, including personality, sexuality and even handedness. Though our collective differences are tiny compared to all we hold in common, they’re also the reason people can be exposed to the same source data, and draw differing conclusions, leading to solutions beyond any one of us.
Hershey’s Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups (“You got chocolate in my peanut butter…”) said it best. The idea was simple; two great tastes accidentally end up together; thereby creating something better than either on their own. (Whether that’s actually the way it happened or not, it’s hard to disagree with the results.) The thing is, from the printing press to the assembly line or the internet, powerful leaps forward almost never happen in a vacuum. They result from the often bracing interactions between two or more diverse thinkers playing off one another. Revolutions, technological or otherwise, are the result of multiple people thinking outside the box, while operating in the same context.
III. Finally, diverse societies are better places to live. We contend with less atmospheric stress, which impacts all aspects of our health and well-being. There’s more grace and less angst, and we encounter less resistance to our individual pursuit of happiness. We’re able to unleash our full creativity on the world and freely think outside our boxes. We’re more inventive and ingenious, productive and passionate, engaged and empowered. We recognize that our uniqueness makes us priceless; not worthless. This is a society that we’re willing to care for, to fight for, and even lay down our lives for.
The Dillingham Flaw
Sociologist Vincent Parrillo, in his book titled Diversity In America, describes a phenomenon he dubs the “Dillingham Flaw”; referencing a 1907 bipartisan presidential commission to study what was thought of as the nation’s “immigration problem”.
Named after its chairman, Sen. William P. Dillingham, findings were heavily influenced by the work of eugenicists like Madison Grant; who not only asserted a racial distinction between “old” and “new” immigrant populations but also that the old immigrant races (note that even in the 1900s, “race” was being applied to groups who traced their lineages to the same place, but who came here, often as little as twenty years earlier) were in danger of being overtaken by inferior ones; including from Southern and Eastern Europe.
A kind of confirmation bias where our group, often unconsciously, over-simplifies, skews, whites out or otherwise misinterprets data about another group to their detriment and to our benefit, the Dillingham Flaw has shaped our telling of America’s history in all manner of ways. Much of our self-understanding has been formed by this lens, including the faulty assertion that we were founded with the intention of being a Christian nation, and our retroactive description of all Europeans as racially “white”; even though that’s not how those same people thought of themselves.
One current example is how we use identifiers. We often refer to Americans of European ancestry by country of origin (German, French, British, etc.), while referring to other groups (African Americans, Asian Americans) by continent. This, despite Europeans being the smallest of these groupings. It was Rose, a New York City nurse from Nigeria, who explained to me that people from the continent of Africa don’t think of themselves as African. “Americans don’t identify as North American,” she said. And you only have three nations. We have 54.” By collapsing these 54 African countries (compared with 44 European countries), into a single label, we dismiss diversity among these peoples. For instance, by 1750, over a hundred African languages were spoken in the “New World”.
Or, take the ways we’ve discounted contributions that don’t fit our narrative, including how few of us are aware that celebrated author Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers; one of the most widely read French authors of all time) and Alexander Pushkin (considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet and founder of modern Russian literature) were both of partial African heritage. Alexandre’s father, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, was the first “person of color” (as we would now erroneously describe him) in the French military to become brigadier general, and the first to become divisional general or general-in-chief of a French army. Though we think of unconscious biases like these as merely theoretical, they have tangible, real-world effect. They inflate one group’s significance and status while diminishing and obscuring others’; resulting in the ongoing impairment of the same societal kin who could be both making us stronger and improving our shared quality of life.
When applied retroactively to the world at the time of the American Revolution, the Dillingham Flaw over-simplifies our demographic history and asserts an inflated sense of sociological homogeneity. Colonial America, for instance, was far more diverse – even by today’s standards – than we give it credit for. Two settlements in particular, right from the beginning, attracted immense diversity; Philadelphia and New York. In 1700 Philadelphia, while English and Welsh were the majority, there were already significant (and growing) populations of Danes, Dutch, Finns, French, Germans, Irish, Scots, and Swedes; plus a range of Indigenous and African peoples. Diversity even existed among those groups themselves. Take German Mennonites, Quakers and Lutherans, who all sought to build separate communities based on their distinct values and priorities.
However, North America’s greatest concentration of diversity, then, as now, was in New Amsterdam; modern-day New York. Eighteen languages were spoken on Manhattan Island as early as 1646. This astonishing diversity was, in large part, due to how colonial America was originally settled. Starting in the 1600s, various European countries competed to be among the first to establish colonies and trade stations around the world. England moved particularly aggressively; annexing lands from Delaware to Cape Cod, and granting land to “proprietors”; people intent on creating communities that reflected their vision of a utopian society. Proprietors, however, found it all but impossible to exert the kind of control they’d originally envisioned. For one thing, attracting settlers to such risky propositions required making concessions, from land grants to self-governance; decisions that would lay the groundwork for the Revolution.
The Fruit of Africa
In a 2013 science journal, Dr. Sydella Blatch, professor of biology at Stevenson University, described how, though we trace the origins of many scientific discoveries to ancient Greece and Rome, that many of these advances were made sometimes thousands of years earlier. In fact, most of us have no real awareness of the many things we’ve learned from these sophisticated, ancient African civilizations, including:
Math - 8,000 years ago, people in what’s now Zaire developed their own number system, as did Yoruba people in present-day Nigeria. The Yoruba system, based on units of 20 instead of 10, made addition, subtraction and multiplication all possible, with certain concepts (like “score” – as in “four score and seven years ago…”) integrated into our system. Mathematicians were capable of predicting the size of floods of the Nile, defined a circle as having 360 degrees and estimated pi at 3.16.
Astronomy - The Dogon (Mali) people’s astronomical expertise included an awareness of Saturn’s rings, Jupiter’s moons, the spiral structure of the Milky Way and the orbit of the Sirius star system. Hundreds of years prior to contact with Europeans, they’d already plotted the Dog Star’s future orbit accurately through the year 1990. (Any escaping slave with this level of knowledge clearly would have had no trouble navigating their way north by constellations.)
Metallurgy/Engineering - Everything from steam engines to metal chisels and saws, copper and iron tools/weapons, nails, glue, as well as carbon steel and bronze weapons, were all in use across the entirety of ancient Africa. Dr. Blatch reports that 2,000 years ago, Tanzanian, Rwandan and Ugandan furnaces were already capable of reaching temperatures of 3272 ºF/1800 ºC; 20 – 25% warmer than Roman furnaces. In addition to the obelisks and more than 80 Egyptian pyramids, by the 12th century, there were hundreds of great cities dotting the continent, including the West African empire of Mali. The city of Timbuktu had palaces, mosques, and universities, and approximately 50,000 residents by the 1500s.
Medicine - Unbelievable to us Americans, African medical practices, prior to the European invasion, were more, rather than less advanced. Some of those practices include the use of plants with salicylic acid for pain (as in aspirin), kaolin for diarrhea (as in Kaopectate), and extracts that were confirmed in the 20th century to kill gram-positive bacteria. According to Dr. Blatch, medical procedures performed in ancient Africa before they were performed in Europe spanned from vaccination, autopsy, and limb traction to bullet removal, skin grafting, filling of dental cavities, installation of false teeth, Caesarean section, anesthesia and tissue cauterization.
Navies - Most of us learn that Europeans were the first to sail to the Americas. However, there is significant evidence, including ancient artwork and cultural artifacts, suggesting that Africans sailed to South America and Asia hundreds of years before Europeans made similar voyages. Many ancient societies in Africa built a variety of boats, including those outfitted with passenger cabins and cooking facilities. Dr. Blatch describes how groups like the Mali and Songhai built 100-foot boats capable of carrying up to 80 tons, including elephants, which as early as the 13th century, were brought back – by boat – from China.
As impressive as this list is, it’s only a partial acknowledgement of the contributions transported Africans made to the nation we’d become. But even a complete one would still be only part of the story. Because Africa’s legacy encompasses far more than those with obvious ancestral ties, it touches everyone whose lineage traces back to mitochondrial Eve, and to the place we’re all from. She’s where we all began and where that which makes us human originated. All of humankind is, at its core, the fruit of Africa.
The Debt We Owe to Asia
One key example of Eurocentric distortion can be seen in how, even today, Westerners categorize the world’s population, and particularly the world’s Asian population. In the 1700s, Asian racial groups represented over 60% of humans on Earth, with China and India alone constituting 36%. Those percentages remain roughly the same today. But watch any sci-fi movie and the humanoid aliens will look like they arrived on the Mayflower.
The Han Chinese are the world's largest single ethnic group and in 2011, they constituted over 19% of the global population. Unbelievably, a segment of the Chinese population, which is a segment of the world’s Asian population, is essentially two times larger than all people of European ancestry worldwide. Despite our downplaying of Asia’s influence on American society, the evidence; from the laborers who literally built so much of America, to the inventions that propelled it forward, proves otherwise. In reality, the debt we owe to Asia is almost incalculable.
Asian Culture - Dennis Carr, Exhibit Curator, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in a 2015 Hyperallergic article titled The Overlooked Asian Influence on Art of the Colonial Americas, described the museum’s new exhibit titled, Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia. On display were over 90 objects collected from North, Central and South America, demonstrating how aesthetics and art traditions of China, Japan, and other Asian countries were already potent influences in the colonial-era Americas.
Examples include porcelain imported to Peru in the 16th century, an Indian embroidered bed cover that arrived in Boston in the 1700s, and a 12-foot Japanese screen entitled The Southern Barbarians Come to Trade, which shows Portuguese traders disembarking in Japan; “Their tight leggings,” according to Carr, “leading up to billowing pants.”
Finds like these revealed how direct trade between the Americas and Asia, something previously thought to have begun in the 19th century, actually dated as far back as the 1500s. “The United States had its own moment of direct trade with Asia just after the American Revolution,” Carr explained, “But in places like Mexico or Brazil, the connection goes back centuries earlier.”
These Asian cultural influences live in virtually everything that is American. American architecture authority, Clay Lancaster, in an academic journal article titled, Japanese Buildings In the United States Before 1900, states: The Japanese elements incorporated in contemporary American dwellings are now so numerous and readily recognized that it is no longer necessary to argue the fact of Far Eastern inspiration. The small home, essentially of wood, in close communion with its setting, having a flexible plan and sliding screen walls, with built-in furniture, restraint of decoration, and quiet color schemes largely achieved by the use of unpainted woods and other natural materials is prevalent throughout America.
Asian Advances - Long before there would be sizeable Asian populations in the colonies, Asia would, through its many inventions and developments, be a major force in shaping America’s course from colony to world power. Ancient China, for instance, already the originator of the Four Great Inventions – paper, the compass, gunpowder and printing – would be the source of others so essential to the United States, that it’s hard to even imagine a “United States” without them. Among those are water wells (as early as 1000 BC), paper currency (900 BC), and the mechanical belt drive, essential to manufacturing (10 BC).
Bombs, cannons, handguns and other gunpowder-related advances, all of which were deployed in the War for Independence, can be traced as far back as 1100 AD, color printing and gas lighting had been invented by the 1300s, smallpox inoculation in the late 900s (some 800 years before Europeans), the kite and the match – both around 500 AD, the oil well in 347 AD, the pinhole camera (470 BC), the wheelbarrow in 100 BC, and the humble toilet paper in 598 AD. In addition, 15th century China was the world's greatest naval power. Under the leadership of Zheng He (pronounced ‘Jung huh’), a eunuch (another example of diversity), the massive ships sailed throughout the Indian Ocean and to Africa, and scholars agree that they easily could have continued on to both Europe and the “New World”. India had a similar global shaping influence, including the inventing dentistry (7,000 BC), water flush toilets, the scale (2,500 BC), cataract surgery (200 AD) and the spinning wheel (500 AD).
Finally, Mesopotamian, Indian and Chinese mathematicians all discovered Pythagoras’ namesake theorem independently, 200 years before him. This is neither an exhaustive list, nor does it take into account the many contributions from other Asian nations, including Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Japan, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Korea and Malaysia.
Asian Immigrants - Though not present in numbers anywhere comparable to their European counterparts, Asian nationalities were present here as early as 1587, when “Luzonians” (modern-day Philippians) landed in Morro Bay (central California) on board a Spanish ship, as well as 1598, after they shipwrecked just off the coast of what is now known as Point Reyes, in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Similarly, people often described as "East Indians" or "Asiatic Indians" are documented as having been part of Jamestown. Research shows that between 1719 and 1725, more than 1,000 Malagasy (Madagascan) slaves were delivered to the Virginia area fifty years before the American Revolution; at that time, a sizeable number. For instance, late-1600s Virginia had an estimated population of 30,000, with only 300 or so Africans and 4,000 indentured Europeans. 1778 would see an influx of Chinese sailors to Hawaii; many of whom would stay, settle down and marry Hawaiian women.
Two years after the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, Chinese sailors aboard the American ship, Pallas, would help sail wares from China to Baltimore. One Baltimore newspaper, seeing this as a direct outgrowth of the vision that fueled the revolution itself, reported: It is no unpleasing Sight to see the crew of this ship, Chinese, Malays, Japanese and Moors… employed together as brethren; it is thus Commerce binds and unites all the Nations of the Globe with a golden Chain. Filipino fishermen from Louisiana would serve under General Andrew Jackson in the War of 1812, and as artillery gunners in the Battle of New Orleans. But it was in the early 1800s that immigration from Asian nations would truly hit its stride.
Chinese (mostly merchants, sailors, and students), had begun arriving via Sino-US maritime trade, and by the 1850s, young, single Asian men, recruited as miners, railroad builders, farmers, factory workers, and fishermen, would shoulder responsibility for building much of our infrastructure. By 1870, Chinese immigrants would comprise 20% of California's labor force, but less than .001% of the US population. As the 1870s depression ensued, we resorted to scapegoating, and this tiny Chinese fragment became our target. Extreme, anti-Chinese sentiment, fomented by people like Denis Kearney, founder of the Workingman’s Party and by California Governor, John Bigler, would lead to the persecution of Chinese workers for economic conditions they neither created, nor had the means of creating.
This wave of racial bigotry, summed up in the slogan, “The Chinese Must Go,” would result in a rash of riots against Asian immigrants, ultimately resulting in the Chinese Exclusion Act; the only federal law explicitly designed to prevent immigration and naturalization on the basis of racial identity, and that would go on to restrict Chinese migration for the next sixty years; declining from 39,500 in 1882, to only 10 (no, that’s not a typo – only ten people) by 1887 – five years later. As expected, however, the banning of Chinese workers only hurt production and industry, which, in turn, led to the heavy recruitment of young Japanese and other Asian laborers.
Instead of learning our lesson, we repeated it, turning our nativist ire against these new immigrants; a sentiment that was pervasive across the United States. On the east coast, Europeans, because they weren’t born here, were declared non-Americans by people often from the same place, but who lay claim to the title simply because they’d caught an earlier boat. Japanese immigration would thus be curtailed by mutual agreement between Japan and the US, followed by the recruitment of South Asian Indian immigrants; including thousands of Sikhs from the Punjabi region, recruited to work on the railroad. Despite being a monotheistic religion, these same Sikhists (from “disciple”, “seeker”, or “learner”), people we’d enticed here, would embarrassingly be misnamed the "Hindu invasion".
The "tide of the Turbans" would be outlawed in 1917, with Congress declaring that India should also be included in what was referred to at the time as the “Pacific-Barred Zone”, a list of excluded Asian countries. This push and pull would continue with other Asian groups, for instance, with Filipino nationals – wash, rinse, repeat – and including the mass internment of Americans of Japanese descent.
A Land for All
We like to think of America as a national equivalent of Athena, who sprang from Zeus’ head, full grown. But we didn’t come to be in a vacuum. We were contextualized in the world that existed at that time, and in the process, absorbed all the good things that the global human family had to offer. This exploration of America’s Asian and African roots could have been done for any group, from Natives, Latinx, and the most obscure European tribes, to South and Central Americans, Arabs and Middle Easterners, and across vast ethnicities; all of whom made invaluable contributions to who we are. That’s because despite both rejection and persecution, they’d bring with them advances and discoveries, skills and know-how, heart and soul. Together, they’d make the dream of America – to be a “For All” society – real. And in doing so, they’d do far more than help build a nation; they’d transform it.
Life on the Ground – Angel Island
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand, A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name? Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome… The New Colossus, Emma Lazarus – 1903
When I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, taking the ferry out to Angel Island for a day of bike riding and picnicking was a common pastime. The views from out there in the middle of a sailboat-laden bay, off the coast of what might be the world’s most beautiful city, with Marin, the East Bay, the Bay Bridge, the Golden Gate and the mouth of the Pacific in the background is utterly breathtaking. From the top of Mount Livermore, one can see everything from Belvedere Island to the Santa Cruz Mountains. No one I knew, however, realized what an unpleasant place Angel Island, at one time, had been. Though virtually every American is familiar with Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, few realize that Angel Island, a comparable processing center for the West Coast, was in many ways its inverse; the site where immigration policy was enforced, particularly against Asian immigrants. In that sense, San Francisco’s Angel Island represents an important counterpoint to New York’s Ellis Island.
On the east coast, we said to Europe, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” But on the west coast, our message to Asia was decidedly different. Hopeful Chinese, detained at Angel Island between 1910 and 1940, were forced to undergo dehumanizing medical examinations not dissimilar to those that would be imposed in Germany against Jews, gays and gypsies a few years later, as well as endure interrogations involving obscure questions such as, "Who lived in the third house of the second row of your village?" Answers deemed inadequate or inappropriate resulted in either continued detainment or even deportation. In 1970, a park ranger would be the first to discover sets of Chinese characters carved into the wooden walls of the barracks. Now recognized as a historic landmark, the Angel Island detention center bears witness to the pain and heartbreak of excluded Chinese immigrants who carved more than one hundred such poems into those walls.
Learning about this would affect me profoundly. Because I’d seen in the lives of so many others, from African Americans in Birmingham, to Native Americans in Oklahoma, to the LGBTQ+ community in San Francisco, what this kind of spiritual wounding, this discounting of another’s worth and denial of their humanity could do. I couldn’t undo what was done on Angel Island. But what I could do was quit being part of the problem. I could stop doing to others, in this case, Americans of Asian descent, what I’d found painful when done to me; those refusals to see me as a person and treat me as an individual.
When I’d go to the Asian market to buy genmaicha, I’d make eye contact with the clerk, smile, and say thank you. When the Thai couple showed up at our church, I made sure to greet them and get to know them. It took all of 45 seconds for the husband and me to realize that we were both sci-fi buffs. And when Jin, my next-door neighbor who spoke no English when she arrived in NY to spend a semester at Columbia, knocked on my door because she couldn’t get her key to work, we became friends. When her parents visited, I invited them all over for “American chili” (which they loved), and her parents offered to pay for me to come visit them in China.
I’d discover that any two people can find points of connection if only they’re willing to look. These types of efforts might not seem like much. But I believe they matter. Because I know that every time someone has looked past a label assigned to me and seen me as a person, I’ve experienced a bit of healing. It’s my hope that I too can do that for others, including descendants of those we interned on Angel Island.
I. The Three ages (or beginning of the end)
Chapter 3 - Manyness and oneness (age of Promise - Part 2) (expand)
Chapter 3 - Manyness and oneness (age of Promise - Part 2) (expand)
The Differentiators – William Penn
‘Cause I live and breathe this Philadelphia Freedom… Elton John and Bernie Taupin
Second things second, don't you tell me what you think that I could be. I'm the one at the sail, I'm the master of my sea, oh ooh, the master of my sea. – Imagine Dragons, Believer
Many of us know William Penn, if for nothing else, as one of a handful of people with a state named after them.
But William did far more than found the English colony, the Province of Pennsylvania and personally oversee the creation of Philadelphia: He was an early advocate of democracy and religious freedom, noted for establishing good relationships and treaties with Native Americans, an esteemed author and perhaps most notably, one of the first, and most influential members of the Religious Society of Friends; the religious group also known as the Quakers.
Born in 1644 in London, William was the son of English Admiral Sir William, and of Lady Margaret, a Dutch heiress. William was about fifteen when he met Thomas Loe, a Quaker missionary, who introduced him to the new Christian sect, which, at that time, was less than ten years old. The fledgling religious movement would go on to have a profound impact on William, and he on it. William arrived at Oxford at a time of significant religious unrest in England.
With aristocratic Anglicans as the domineering majority, both Puritans and nonconforming Quakers were subject to hazing and exclusion. Though officially a Cavalier (aristocratic Anglican) by social standing, William’s sympathies lay with the persecuted Quakers, and through his time at Oxford, he gained first-hand experience with what it was like to live as a minority. He would carry these lessons with him for the rest of his life.
When Oxford theologian, John Owen, was fired from his deanery, William, along with a number of other more open-minded students rallied to his side, including attending talks held at his home. It was those intellectual discussions that equipped William with the skills needed to transform ideas into theory, to refine theory through reasoned debate, and finally, to apply these theories out in the real world. After law school, William’s father sent him to Ireland to manage family holdings. While there, he embarked upon the pursuit of two rather divergent paths; serving a stint as a soldier and exploring nonviolent Quaker spirituality.
Outlawed by that time, William’s attendance at Quaker meetings led to his arrest, and rather than distance himself from the movement, he publicly declared himself a member. In pleading his case, he argued that since Quakers, unlike Puritans and many other Christian movements, had no political agenda, the group should not be subject to laws outlawing religious beliefs that undermined English political policy. However, it was his family's rank, rather than his arguments, that got him released.
William was immediately recalled to London by his father and given William’s absolute refusal to amend his views, his father, in order to protect the family’s social standing, banished William from the home and withheld his inheritance. Undaunted, he immersed himself even further in Quakerism, including the embracing of practices such as refusing to bow to or take off one’s hat for those deemed socially superior (a precursor to the practice of Negro men stepping off the sidewalk and removing one’s hat for socially white passersby in the United States’ segregation era).
Their firm belief that all men are equal under God was antithetical to both aristocracies in general and monarchies in particular, especially ones that believed that it was God himself who had ordained some people to rule and relegated others to a life of servitude. Over this time, William also developed a close friendship with George Fox himself, the movement’s founder; a mutually influential relationship for both of them. A core tenet of Fox’s theology was, "God who made the world did not dwell in temples made with hands," a belief that effectively nullified the church’s otherwise supreme and unassailable authority over the people.
William eloquently articulated Fox’s views in his writings, including its underlying premise; the basis of much of modern political history; the rights of the individual. It is upon this singular thought that modern democracies were later founded. William would go on to be imprisoned for his writings (the official charge was publication without a license, but the real alleged crime was blasphemy). As such, the Bishop of London ordered that he be held indefinitely until he publicly recanted his written statements. Instead, he wrote the famous No Cross, No Crown; one of the most influential books on Christian theology ever written.
Expecting to never be released, William declared, “My prison shall be my grave before I will budge a jot: for I owe my conscience to no mortal man.” He was released after eight months of imprisonment, but this would be far from the last time he was arrested and branded a “political agitator”; the same charge that would be leveled against Martin and the Civil Rights movement 300 years later.
Despite his detractors (including the Crown), William continued his missionary work; vigorously advocating for religious tolerance, railing against discriminatory laws and systematically dismantling arguments that maintained that some men are inherently superior, and others, inferior. Both his teachings and his bold refusal to back down from power drove rapid increases in Quaker membership, and with it, the movement’s influence grew; as did animosity from religious rivals.
The increasing enmity and escalating social volatility led William to propose a solution to the King – the mass emigration of English Quakers to North America. And in 1677, William, along with a group of other prominent Quakers, purchased the colonial province of West Jersey; essentially, half of the present-day State of New Jersey. William continued to lobby for additional land, and was surprised when the King agreed to an expansive charter of over 45,000 square miles (notice the assumption that this was the king’s land to sell), making William the world's largest private landowner. He also gained sovereign rule of the territory with all rights and privileges, except for the power to declare war.
In return, the Crown was owed one-fifth of any gold or silver mined in the province and the Monarchy was freed of a debt to William’s father of £16,000, or the equivalent of £2.5 million today. William first called the area "New Wales", then "Sylvania" (Latin for "forests" or "woods"), with the King changing the name to "Pennsylvania" in honor of William’s father. William immediately set to work; drafting a charter of liberties that created a kind of political utopia unlike anything in existence at the time.
Among other things, the charter guaranteed free and fair trial by jury, freedom of (and from) religion, freedom from unjust imprisonment and, perhaps most importantly, free elections; all of which became foundational components of the United States of America. His dreams shaped not only a new nation but a new kind of nation. But his legacy didn’t stop there: It includes Quakerism itself; a religious movement that he, as much as anyone, built.
More than any other group in America, whether sacred or secular, Quakers would go on to dedicate their heart and soul to the abolition of slavery in the United States. In doing so, they changed the fundamental nature of an entire nation, and made the values that William had held so deeply, real for all of us. William Penn’s life stands as testament that one can dream of things not yet dreamt of, and that we can, if our conviction is strong enough, call even the most impossible of those previously yet-to-be-imagined things, into being.
Diversity - Sustainable Societies’ Key Ingredient #1 (continued)Religious Diversity in Early America
In 2010, when President Obama noted that “Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding,” his claims were met with vociferous and irrational outrage – especially given that they were true. For instance, while no Founding Fathers were professed followers of Islam, at least two, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, owned copies of the Quran, and the documented presence of Muslims themselves precedes the American Revolution by a century.
A 1682 Virginia statute declared, "Negroes, moores, molatoes, and others, born of and in heathenish, idollatrous, pagan, and Mahometan [an ancient word for Muslim] parentage and country" could, from that time on, be “purchased, procured, or otherwise obteigned, as slaves.” Historian Peter Manseau, in One Nation Under Gods: A New American History, asserts: In an era of fracturing traditional affiliations and endless schisms among the newly established churches, the number of Muslims brought to this predominantly Christian land would have rivaled the populations of many Christian denominations in eighteenth-century America… [They] would likely have dwarfed the number of Roman Catholics or Jews in this period.
One of the most famous examples of America’s early Muslim presence is Islamic scholar, Omar Ibn Said. Born in 1770 and educated in what is now Senegal, West Africa, Omar, at 37 years old, was enslaved and brought to the United States in 1807, where he would remain a slave for the rest of his life. Omar would, over the next fifty years, write prolifically, including works of history, theology, and an autobiography. Then, there’s Peter Salem, an American Moor who was one of several Revolutionary War heroes.
Peter, born into slavery in Massachusetts, enlisted as a Minute Man while still enslaved. His valor inspired his owners, who would free him, and Peter became a full-time soldier in the Continental army. Fighting in the famous Battle of Bunker Hill, it is Peter who is credited with the killing of British Major John Pitcairn; just as he was scaling the top of the American redoubt and demanding that the Patriots surrender. In fact, many historians believe that the dark-skinned man immortalized in James E Taylor’s painting of the Battle is Peter himself.
Part of why Islam’s role in early America is so obscured is because of the complicated and shifting relationship between religion (which, at the time, was thought of as a race – Jews and Moors, Buddhists and Sikhists) and the not fully institutionalized practice of slavery. The prevailing belief was that though Christians could be indentured for a set period, they could not be reduced to outright slavery. Non-Christians, however, could be enslaved. This would prove untenable. As long as religion was considered a race, evangelism, a fundamental goal of much of Christianity, was squarely at odds with slavery; the more Christianity spread, the fewer people could be bought, sold and owned.
In what would be the first of many disappointing compromises, the Church allowed the passage of a 1667 Virginia law guaranteeing that Christian baptism would not “alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedom.” The law was a win-win for both the spread of Christianity and of slavery. Once passed, the Church would then declare that all enslaved men and women “brought or imported into this country, either by sea or land, whether Negroes, Moors [Muslims], Mollatoes or Indians... shall be converted to the Christian faith.”
What emerged was a version of Christianity that could coexist alongside slavery; one that sought to save souls, and at the same time, reap the economic benefits of exploitation. These forced conversions nearly expunged Islam, the world’s second largest religion, from our shores. Islam, however, was far from the only non-Christian religion present in America’s early days. Buddhism, both as formal religion and spiritual practice, had been and remains a prominent shaping influence of every aspect of American spirituality.
Arriving at Jamestown with the immigrants who brought it here, subsequent contact with Asia would further integrate it into American culture. By the 1840s, Americans and Europeans, returning from travels to the east, were increasingly bringing Buddhism with them; its influences showing up in literary works, from Walt Whitman to Henry Thoreau to Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Likewise, Spaniard, Elias Legarde, who arrived at Jamestown in 1621, is but one example of Jewish presence in the “New World” 150 years before the American Revolution. By the mid-1600s, there was a thriving Jewish community in New Amsterdam (modern day New York), followed by others throughout New England. An estimated 100 Jewish men served in the Continental army, and Haym Salomon, a Polish Jew who immigrated to America in 1772, was not only a member of the Sons of Liberty but was one of the Revolution’s greatest financial backers.
Additionally, American culture was influenced by other faith traditions, including previously mentioned Sikhism, as well as the profound influence of both Indigenous and Traditional African spirituality; including the ways they shaped, and subsequently, were folded into then-contemporary Christian beliefs. Historian Yuval Noah Harari, in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, describes how syncretism is pervasive in Christianity. “Monotheism,” he states, “As it has played out in history, is a kaleidoscope of monotheist, dualist, polytheist and animist legacies, jumbling together under a single divine umbrella. The average Christian believes in the monotheist God, but also in the dualist Devil, in the polytheist saints, and in animist ghosts.”
It’s here that many of us start to wonder if this is taking things too far. “I get ethnic diversity,” we say, “But religious diversity??” This especially causes us misgivings if we’ve been taught that our faith tradition represents the true, and perhaps only, path to God. By applying the same hierarchical structure built into the ARC, we find ourselves declaring that our faith group holds the “truest” truth; that we’re closest to God, and that the further the beliefs of other groups are from ours, the less valid they are. Take my experience. The unspoken sentiment among many of my fellow Southern Baptist ministers was that ecumenical activities were largely a waste of time. In that framework, only other Evangelicals have the “true” truth.
On the next rung would be mainline Protestantism, thought of as more legitimate than the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox church, both of whom, by believing in Christ are deemed closer to the truth than Judaism, which is apparently closer than Islam, which, as an Abrahamic faith, is supposedly truer than Eastern religions, all of whom are presumably more valid than Paganism, which is, according to them, better than atheism. Other bodies who declare themselves God’s authoritative intermediaries here on earth have similar frameworks, of course, with them at the top.
But this path is rife with dangers; not the least of which is the sin of smug self-assurance. Then, there’s the violence. The step from asserting that only we are God’s favorite to weaponizing our faith is a small one. That’s what happened in the late 1960s. Clergy began explicitly teaching congregants that being a member of the faithful meant being a soldier in the coming war for the soul of America; one that had the same goals as most other wars; the elimination of one’s rivals and the absorption of that rival’s assets, and its people.
From the land of Canaan to the Land of Opportunity, our history repeatedly reveals to us how this approach, this kicking against the goads of diversity, creates the exact problems we hope to solve. First, we become facilitators of a culture where verbal violence is normative; a tragic outcome given the humanitarian ethos we claim our respective faiths are built on. Our preemptive actions turn those who could have been friends into foes, allies into enemies; and by making society hostile toward others, we create an environment that compels others to do the same to us.
The second problem is worse: If we are somehow successful at eliminating our rivals, we all pay the price. Just as our personal diversity benefits all of us, so does religious diversity. One of faith systems’ most important functions is holding and transferring all manner of wisdom, cultural technology and social learning to future generations. Everything from the advances in medicine that Africans brought to America, to Quakers’ moral stand against the slavery industry, to the 26 Catholic monasteries that worked together to hide European Jews, to the Beloved Community at the core of the Civil Rights movement, to Buddhism-inspired Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, was encoded in, and passed on through faith systems. When we eliminate them, we also eliminate the gift they could have been to us. Once this wisdom and the systems that held it are gone, like the loss of our oceans’ marine life, it is we who are lesser for it.
But perhaps worst of all is what it does to us as people. Like other social institutions, religions have a primary orientation, a focus, a core reason for existing. They were created to benefit us, to serve us and to help us both be better and live better. And early on, they, like most institutions, do their job well; helping us see how being better people, forging community, facing our fears, strengthening our resolve, and passing on accumulated knowledge and wisdom to the next generation, leads to a fulfilled life. But over time, that orientation can gradually flip, from serving us to us serving them. As the focus of our faith systems shift from blessing to blaming, from humanity to hierarchy, and from conscience to conformity, both what we do and what we deem acceptable to do to others changes.
Our actions become increasingly inhumane, our attitudes increasingly toxic, and in reversing its focus, we disable one of religion’s core functions; to sound the alarm when our humanity is in danger. It’s because of this that people are increasingly opting to leave these institutions behind, and how, today, we’ve become a society where the majority religious affiliation is “none”.
Diversity among America’s Founders
Even the men we refer to as our Founding Fathers, whether they realized it or not, owed much of their success to diversity. While Most were English, that’s essentially where the similarities end. They’d grown up in different places, were educated in different ways, followed different faith paths, were of different classes, and even differed in terms of family history in the colonies. Their diversity, manifest in everything from the values they held to the insights they brought, made the unlikely success of the American Revolution possible.
Take John Adams, a direct descendant of Puritans who came to the American wilderness in the 1630s. Having a profound influence on American culture, laws and traditions of their region, Puritans envisioned themselves as a new Israel, with the shores of America as their promised land away from England, their modern day Egypt. Their calling was to establish an epicenter of human goodness, a city on a hill. It was this and other sensibilities, along with a deep commitment to liberty and justice (not to mention a dogged determination) that John brought to the assembly of founders.
However, some of his most important contributions didn’t originate with him, but rather with his wife, Abigail; his most trusted advisor and strongest source of guidance. In fact, her influence was so great that some consider her an actual Founding Father in her own right. For instance, in March 1776, Abigail wrote the entire Continental Congress, stating: “Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”
Then, there’s Alexander Hamilton. Born out of wedlock in the West Indies to a Scottish father and an English/French mother, young Alexander, left alone when his mother died, received no support from his father. He was cared for by an older cousin, and later, by a local merchant family. A group of wealthy men from around town, recognizing his potential, sponsored his attendance at King’s College; now known as Columbia University. While John Adams could trace his lineage in what would be the US back 150 years, Alexander came here as a college student.
When King’s College closed down during the city’s British occupation, he joined a militia and built a provincial artillery where he was commissioned captain. Serving as senior aide to military commander-in-chief George Washington, he was instrumental in intelligence, effectively conveying Washington’s plans to his generals and back. It was his unconventional background that equipped Alexander with the skills to excel in such chaos and dynamism, and that, over time, would allow him, though one of the youngest Founding Fathers, to also be among the most influential.
Alternately, there’s Benjamin Franklin, who was 70 at the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Born in 1706, he’d already lived a full and colorful life by the time the revolution occurred. But this didn’t stop him from pouring himself into the cause, and many believe that if not for his prudent guidance, the independence effort would have been abandoned, if not stillborn. In addition to his intelligence, he, as one of the oldest and most well-traveled Founders, brought the kind of vital wisdom that only comes with experience. Though never formally trained in any particular field, he was a polymath with genius-level proficiencies in everything from science to political theory to human behavior.
He was a prolific author and inventor, including, of course, his work on electricity, and he spoke five languages. Perhaps more than anyone else, he, by his actions, words and manner, gave definition to an emerging American ethos, one that was a combination of practical values like hard work, community spirit, self-governance, tolerance, egalitarianism and no small amount of humor. Journalist Walter Isaacson described Franklin as the most accomplished American of his era, and “the most influential in inventing the type of society America would become.”
The age range of the Founding Fathers at the signing of the Declaration of Independence included signers ranging from 15 years old to 81. 70-year-old Benjamin Franklin was second oldest; 19-year-old Alexander Hamilton, the second youngest. There was also significant religious diversity among the group, from Deists to Anglicans, Catholics, Unitarians, the gamut of Protestants, plus a significant number of “none of the above”.
Historian Gregg Frazer argues that many of the most influential Founders, Adams, Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, Morris, Washington and Wilson, fit neither the Christian nor Deist mold, but rather, something that was both a hybrid of the two and at the same time, something different from them both; providing a prominent example of how diversity advances humankind.
The Differentiators – An Ex-Slave, an Epileptic, and a Woman
We’re a nation whose machinery has been built, from the ground up, to disqualify diversity. Yet, there are those who overcome; who recognize the very things we deem demerits as merits, and who, rather than let their differences sideline them, embrace them as strengths. There are no better examples of this than George Washington Carver – an ex-slave, Nikola Tesla – an epileptic immigrant, and Mary Anderson – both female and Southern.
George
George Washington Carver was one of the world’s most innovative scientist-inventors. A botanist by training, he is most famous for his research into and promotion of alternatives to soil-depleting cotton crops; including soybeans, sweet potatoes, and, of course, peanuts. As arduous as his life was, George was, by his own account, blessed with a number of benevolent relationships that made everything he did possible. George was born into slavery. Moses Carver had purchased teenage Mary, George’s mother, to help his wife, Susan, on the farm, and when George was only a week old, he and Mary were kidnapped by slave raiders.
Moses hired John Bentley to find them, but Mary had already been sold. Moses traded his horse for sickly George’s return, and after slavery was abolished, he and Susan raised George as their own. This was the first of the significant relationships that dotted George’s life. His adopted mom taught him to read, and they both, realizing that George was intellectually gifted, encouraged him to pursue those gifts. Growing up on the farm, George spent tremendous amounts of time alone and in nature; which is where his love of agriculture began. Later in life, he’d describe flowers as his childhood pets and that, even as a young boy, vegetation seemed to thrive under his touch.
George was eleven when he left home. He moved ten miles south to the neighboring Neosho in order to attend a school for colored children. It was here that he met Mariah Watkins; a second profound influence on George’s development. Mariah, along with her husband, owned the land where the school was housed. They also provided him with lodging and cared for him over his school years. When she asked his name, he identified himself as “Carver’s George”, as he’d always done. She replied that from now on, his name was “George Carver”.
According to George, Mariah, who was a Union nurse in the Civil War, said to him: "You must learn all you can, then go back out into the world and give your learning back to the people". That became an important touchstone for him. George applied to a number of colleges and was accepted at Highland College in Highland, KS. When he arrived, however, his racial identity apparent, he was refused entry. He opted to homestead, manually plowing 17 acres. He ultimately ended up attending Iowa State, where he was both the first African American student and later, the first African American faculty member. In 1896, Booker T. Washington invited George to head the Agriculture department at Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University); which he did for the next 47 years.
From 1915 to 1923, George concentrated on researching and experimenting with new uses for a range of crops far beyond food. These efforts were particularly important given the boll weevil infestation that utterly decimated American cotton. The beetles, spreading at 40 to 160 miles per year, were everywhere. George developed techniques to improve soils damaged by the continual planting of cotton, and through his “movable schools”, helped farmers learn to restore nitrogen to their soils by practicing systematic crop rotation with crops that were both good for the soil and useful to us.
From the peanut alone, George developed more than 100 products; from cosmetics to dyes, paints, plastics, gasoline and nitroglycerin. He published agricultural bulletins on his innovations, articles in peanut industry journals, and wrote a syndicated newspaper column, "Professor Carver's Advice". But George wasn’t just a genius inventor; he believed in a better America; which is why he spent four years touring historically white Southern colleges for the Commission on Interracial Cooperation.
In 1916, George was made a member of the Royal Society of Arts in England; one of very few Americans to receive this honor. He was friends with fellow inventor Henry Ford, and Henry even installed an elevator at the Institute so that an elderly George didn’t have to climb the stairs. The Crown Prince of Sweden spent a one-month intensive under George’s tutelage. He was friends with Mahatma Gandhi and traveled to India to advise him on nutrition in developing nations. He testified before Congress. He was sought out by and gave advice to three American presidents, Teddy Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge and FDR, and in 1941, Time magazine named him the “Black Leonardo da Vince”.
"Patriarch George Washington Carver, who hobbles benignly about Tuskegee's campus, is an artist," the article began. "But he is better known as the greatest Negro scientist alive, the man who pioneered new uses for Southern agricultural products, developed 285 new uses for the peanut, got 118 products, including vinegar, molasses and shoe blacking, from the South's surplus sweet potatoes. In his laboratory he and his assistants also make paints and dyes from the red Alabama clay, the oil of the Alabama peanut, with which he paints the natural phenomena he sees around him: birds, fruit, flowers, mountain vistas."
Nikola
From the beginning, Nikola Tesla epitomized diversity. Of Serbian ancestry, he was born in modern-day Croatia in 1856 to a father who was an orthodox priest and a mother who was the daughter of an orthodox priest. The fourth of five children, Nikola had an older brother and three sisters.
When his brother was killed in a horseback accident, his father wanted more than ever for him to become a priest, but Nikola, already a scientific and mathematical prodigy, wanted a different life. Throughout childhood, he was beset by numerous life-threatening illnesses and was bedridden for weeks at a time. He also suffered from a physical disability, seizures that often involved blinding flashes of light and visions; ones that proved instrumental to his work for the rest of his life.
He was in his late twenties when he immigrated to America to work for Thomas Edison and he became a naturalized United States citizen about seven years later. Nikola was generally characterized as asocial by those who knew him, though he was well-liked and counted people like Mark Twain and Julian Hawthorne among his friends. Julian, describing Nikola, wrote, "Seldom did one meet a scientist or engineer who was also a poet, a philosopher, an appreciator of fine music, a linguist, and a connoisseur of food and drink."
From childhood, he spent a tremendous amount of time alone and focused on his studies, designs and ideas. This largely self-imposed isolation paired with an eidetic memory, his creativity, and the unique way his mind worked, made for a potent combination, and allowed Nikola to become an expert in a vast array of subjects. He spoke eight languages, memorized complete books, and as a teenager, could perform integral calculus in his head.
Nikola Tesla is credited with some of the most profound scientific advancements in modern history, including the invention of AC (alternating current), the science behind wireless communications, radio and X-ray imaging. Over his lifetime, he obtained over 300 patents in twenty-six countries, and many of his inventions were never patented.
Mary
Mary Anderson was an unusual woman for her time. She was a successful real estate developer, viticulturist and businesswoman, and inventor of the windshield wiper. And she is the very personification of the term, “American ingenuity.” Born in Greene County, Alabama, in 1866, one year after the conclusion of the Civil War, by age 22, she, her sister and her widowed mother had relocated to Birmingham.
Founded just sixteen years prior in 1871, but with a population of 26,000 and counting, Birmingham was already one of the largest and the fastest growing city in the South. There, she built the still-standing, Fairmont Apartments on Highland Avenue (incidentally, located right down the hill from the high school I attended), before eventually moving cross-country to Fresno, California, where she owned and ran a successful cattle ranch and vineyard.
On a visit to New York City in 1903, she noted that the motorman drove with the front window open because of the difficulty of keeping the windshield clear of falling snow and sleet. Periodically, he’d reach his arm out the window and use his sleeve to clear the windshield. Upon returning to Alabama, she hired a designer to help her develop a hand-operated device to keep the windshield clear, then, she had a local company produce a working model. She applied for and received a 17-year patent for the “windshield wiper”.
Mary was adventurous, curious, and unafraid to pursue a goal – even in areas that were generally considered to be man’s work. We don’t know much about her personal life, but given that she never married or had any known relationships, it’s believed she was some version of what, today, we’d describe as “LGBTQ+”. This diversity, Mary’s own adventurous spirit, and having lost her father at an early age, all likely contributed to the deep sense of agency that allowed her to traverse the country, launch new ventures, and achieve success in so many areas at a time when most women stayed home and stayed put.
Her windshield wiper device consisted of a lever inside the vehicle that controlled a rubber blade on the outside. The lever could be operated to cause the spring-loaded arm to move back and forth across the glass. A counterweight was used to ensure contact between the wiper and the window. Though similar devices had been made earlier, hers was the first to prove effective.
In 1905, Mary tried to sell the rights to her invention through a prominent Canadian brokerage, but they rejected her application saying "we do not consider it to be of such commercial value as would warrant our undertaking its sale." People scoffed at Mary’s invention, saying that the wipers’ movement would distract the driver and cause accidents, and Mary was never successful at selling the patent.
Nevertheless, by the early 1920s, windshield wipers using Mary’s design had become standard equipment on automobiles. Upon her death many years later, The New York Times carried her obituary, crediting her for her invention, and in 2011, Mary was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
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In the end, it’s astounding how much we owe to George, Nikola and Mary, and to so many others we’ve dismissed because they’re different; distilling them down to the labels we affix to them – including as ex-slave, epileptic, or woman – as if this somehow invalidates them. But it doesn’t. In fact, it’s those very differences – our unique traits, the trials we face, and the way we face them – that empower us to not just emancipate ourselves, but inspire others, and in the process, leave the world itself better than we found it.
The Crux of Diversification
Our shared story has, in myriad ways, always been so much more diverse than our telling of it. Take the 100 or so Africans who arrived here in 1526, almost a century before the Pilgrims. Though brought as part of a slave contingent on a Spanish boat, they wouldn’t be slaves for long. Staging a coordinated revolt, they set fire to the leader’s house, killed him, melted into the forest, and took up new lives among the natives. There was the steady stream of European entrepreneurs and fortune-seekers, debtors and refugees, pilgrims and asylees; all intent on carving out their own little place in the world.
Even the names they gave their settlements reflected diversity; from tributes to places in their homelands (New Orleans (France), Haarlem (Holland), Hamburg (Germany), and New Smyrna (Greece), to “new” versions of their home countries – New England, New France, New Spain, and New Sweden. And that’s before getting to all the names adopted from indigenous nations – Alabama and Oklahoma, New Mexico and California, Hawaii and the Dakotas – names given to these places long before Europeans knew they existed.
Think of all the myriad other ways diversity was at the core of our becoming. For instance, the women who contributed just as much, if not more, to the forming of America as did men (and it’s to our shame that we have no collective memory of our Founding Mothers). Or, of the love sown into the very land itself, by those who came before us. There are all the diverse forms of family, from nuclear to extended, from unmarried partners to fostered kin, that have always existed within our borders.
And there are the members of the LGBTQ+ community who, long before they were recognized as such, were here, shaping and contributing to every aspect of the American story. Art collectors and spouses Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell, in 2020, published LOVING. A Photographic History of Men in Love, which portrays male couples in hundreds of photographs taken during the 100-year period between the 1850s and 1950s.
The collection of 2,800 photos, the result of a twenty-year effort in cultural excavation, was astonishing in both diversity (from 19th century laborers to 20th century executives, working class and professionals, artists and academics, soldiers and scientists, of all ages and ethnicities) and their breadth; spanning from the Civil War, through WWII, and into the 1950s. Another example of the Dillingham Flaw, LOVING is an undeniable reminder that we’ve always been far more diverse than our boxes allowed, and that we’ve always been better off for it. And that’s the crux of diversification; it is the gear that turns the cosmos. Everything that exists or that comes into existence, from a newborn baby to a newborn star, does so in a state of change.
To exist is to be in motion, going somewhere, becoming something. And every becoming makes it possible for yet other things to exist. So, when we seek to stop its advance, to rail against it by creating categories that enforce conformity and require homogeneity, we only succeed in creating spaces where we ourselves can’t breathe; splintering ourselves into ever-increasing factions. It is because of this that the Catholic Church, 600 years after having been declared Rome’s state religion, would splinter, with both factions claiming to be the “One, Holy, Apostolic Church.” Then, in the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Church would split again. Then, Protestants would diverge into over 200 denominations from Anabaptists to Schwenkfelders, then, each of those would split; which is how Baptists, my own denomination, ended up with 50-plus distinct variations claiming the name.
Diversity simply cannot be stopped. But we can, by how we perceive of and engage with it, leave our societies shattered and ourselves poorer, rather than stronger and richer for it. All of us alive today are participants in what might be the grandest social experiment in the history of humankind. We live in an era where virtually every society is multicultural and multi-religious, multiethnic and multi-generational, where combinations and variations are the norm, where preexisting constructs are being deconstructed, and where complexity is multiplying; all in an increasingly mobile and interconnected global community. This is the reality the Alphas were born into and is what they see when they view the world.
As such, the United States might be in rare company as a nation birthed by people from virtually every other nation, but today, there is almost nowhere we can go and live out our lives surrounded only by those with whom we claim common lineage; our prescribed tribe.
That leaves us with a choice; seek to impede our continual diversification or embrace it as one of our most potent gifts, pine for the relative simplicity of our past or become co-creators of a powerful future. We Americans might have given frameworks like whiteness and the ARC to the world, but they were perversions of the gift we could have given – that of allness.
In reality, this commitment to embrace both manyness and oneness has always been our greatest strength, and the better at it we get, the stronger, more vibrant and more sustainable we will be. It’s in this sense that America is a nation built for diversity, and that the world’s diversity, in turn, built America.
‘Cause I live and breathe this Philadelphia Freedom… Elton John and Bernie Taupin
Second things second, don't you tell me what you think that I could be. I'm the one at the sail, I'm the master of my sea, oh ooh, the master of my sea. – Imagine Dragons, Believer
Many of us know William Penn, if for nothing else, as one of a handful of people with a state named after them.
But William did far more than found the English colony, the Province of Pennsylvania and personally oversee the creation of Philadelphia: He was an early advocate of democracy and religious freedom, noted for establishing good relationships and treaties with Native Americans, an esteemed author and perhaps most notably, one of the first, and most influential members of the Religious Society of Friends; the religious group also known as the Quakers.
Born in 1644 in London, William was the son of English Admiral Sir William, and of Lady Margaret, a Dutch heiress. William was about fifteen when he met Thomas Loe, a Quaker missionary, who introduced him to the new Christian sect, which, at that time, was less than ten years old. The fledgling religious movement would go on to have a profound impact on William, and he on it. William arrived at Oxford at a time of significant religious unrest in England.
With aristocratic Anglicans as the domineering majority, both Puritans and nonconforming Quakers were subject to hazing and exclusion. Though officially a Cavalier (aristocratic Anglican) by social standing, William’s sympathies lay with the persecuted Quakers, and through his time at Oxford, he gained first-hand experience with what it was like to live as a minority. He would carry these lessons with him for the rest of his life.
When Oxford theologian, John Owen, was fired from his deanery, William, along with a number of other more open-minded students rallied to his side, including attending talks held at his home. It was those intellectual discussions that equipped William with the skills needed to transform ideas into theory, to refine theory through reasoned debate, and finally, to apply these theories out in the real world. After law school, William’s father sent him to Ireland to manage family holdings. While there, he embarked upon the pursuit of two rather divergent paths; serving a stint as a soldier and exploring nonviolent Quaker spirituality.
Outlawed by that time, William’s attendance at Quaker meetings led to his arrest, and rather than distance himself from the movement, he publicly declared himself a member. In pleading his case, he argued that since Quakers, unlike Puritans and many other Christian movements, had no political agenda, the group should not be subject to laws outlawing religious beliefs that undermined English political policy. However, it was his family's rank, rather than his arguments, that got him released.
William was immediately recalled to London by his father and given William’s absolute refusal to amend his views, his father, in order to protect the family’s social standing, banished William from the home and withheld his inheritance. Undaunted, he immersed himself even further in Quakerism, including the embracing of practices such as refusing to bow to or take off one’s hat for those deemed socially superior (a precursor to the practice of Negro men stepping off the sidewalk and removing one’s hat for socially white passersby in the United States’ segregation era).
Their firm belief that all men are equal under God was antithetical to both aristocracies in general and monarchies in particular, especially ones that believed that it was God himself who had ordained some people to rule and relegated others to a life of servitude. Over this time, William also developed a close friendship with George Fox himself, the movement’s founder; a mutually influential relationship for both of them. A core tenet of Fox’s theology was, "God who made the world did not dwell in temples made with hands," a belief that effectively nullified the church’s otherwise supreme and unassailable authority over the people.
William eloquently articulated Fox’s views in his writings, including its underlying premise; the basis of much of modern political history; the rights of the individual. It is upon this singular thought that modern democracies were later founded. William would go on to be imprisoned for his writings (the official charge was publication without a license, but the real alleged crime was blasphemy). As such, the Bishop of London ordered that he be held indefinitely until he publicly recanted his written statements. Instead, he wrote the famous No Cross, No Crown; one of the most influential books on Christian theology ever written.
Expecting to never be released, William declared, “My prison shall be my grave before I will budge a jot: for I owe my conscience to no mortal man.” He was released after eight months of imprisonment, but this would be far from the last time he was arrested and branded a “political agitator”; the same charge that would be leveled against Martin and the Civil Rights movement 300 years later.
Despite his detractors (including the Crown), William continued his missionary work; vigorously advocating for religious tolerance, railing against discriminatory laws and systematically dismantling arguments that maintained that some men are inherently superior, and others, inferior. Both his teachings and his bold refusal to back down from power drove rapid increases in Quaker membership, and with it, the movement’s influence grew; as did animosity from religious rivals.
The increasing enmity and escalating social volatility led William to propose a solution to the King – the mass emigration of English Quakers to North America. And in 1677, William, along with a group of other prominent Quakers, purchased the colonial province of West Jersey; essentially, half of the present-day State of New Jersey. William continued to lobby for additional land, and was surprised when the King agreed to an expansive charter of over 45,000 square miles (notice the assumption that this was the king’s land to sell), making William the world's largest private landowner. He also gained sovereign rule of the territory with all rights and privileges, except for the power to declare war.
In return, the Crown was owed one-fifth of any gold or silver mined in the province and the Monarchy was freed of a debt to William’s father of £16,000, or the equivalent of £2.5 million today. William first called the area "New Wales", then "Sylvania" (Latin for "forests" or "woods"), with the King changing the name to "Pennsylvania" in honor of William’s father. William immediately set to work; drafting a charter of liberties that created a kind of political utopia unlike anything in existence at the time.
Among other things, the charter guaranteed free and fair trial by jury, freedom of (and from) religion, freedom from unjust imprisonment and, perhaps most importantly, free elections; all of which became foundational components of the United States of America. His dreams shaped not only a new nation but a new kind of nation. But his legacy didn’t stop there: It includes Quakerism itself; a religious movement that he, as much as anyone, built.
More than any other group in America, whether sacred or secular, Quakers would go on to dedicate their heart and soul to the abolition of slavery in the United States. In doing so, they changed the fundamental nature of an entire nation, and made the values that William had held so deeply, real for all of us. William Penn’s life stands as testament that one can dream of things not yet dreamt of, and that we can, if our conviction is strong enough, call even the most impossible of those previously yet-to-be-imagined things, into being.
Diversity - Sustainable Societies’ Key Ingredient #1 (continued)Religious Diversity in Early America
In 2010, when President Obama noted that “Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding,” his claims were met with vociferous and irrational outrage – especially given that they were true. For instance, while no Founding Fathers were professed followers of Islam, at least two, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, owned copies of the Quran, and the documented presence of Muslims themselves precedes the American Revolution by a century.
A 1682 Virginia statute declared, "Negroes, moores, molatoes, and others, born of and in heathenish, idollatrous, pagan, and Mahometan [an ancient word for Muslim] parentage and country" could, from that time on, be “purchased, procured, or otherwise obteigned, as slaves.” Historian Peter Manseau, in One Nation Under Gods: A New American History, asserts: In an era of fracturing traditional affiliations and endless schisms among the newly established churches, the number of Muslims brought to this predominantly Christian land would have rivaled the populations of many Christian denominations in eighteenth-century America… [They] would likely have dwarfed the number of Roman Catholics or Jews in this period.
One of the most famous examples of America’s early Muslim presence is Islamic scholar, Omar Ibn Said. Born in 1770 and educated in what is now Senegal, West Africa, Omar, at 37 years old, was enslaved and brought to the United States in 1807, where he would remain a slave for the rest of his life. Omar would, over the next fifty years, write prolifically, including works of history, theology, and an autobiography. Then, there’s Peter Salem, an American Moor who was one of several Revolutionary War heroes.
Peter, born into slavery in Massachusetts, enlisted as a Minute Man while still enslaved. His valor inspired his owners, who would free him, and Peter became a full-time soldier in the Continental army. Fighting in the famous Battle of Bunker Hill, it is Peter who is credited with the killing of British Major John Pitcairn; just as he was scaling the top of the American redoubt and demanding that the Patriots surrender. In fact, many historians believe that the dark-skinned man immortalized in James E Taylor’s painting of the Battle is Peter himself.
Part of why Islam’s role in early America is so obscured is because of the complicated and shifting relationship between religion (which, at the time, was thought of as a race – Jews and Moors, Buddhists and Sikhists) and the not fully institutionalized practice of slavery. The prevailing belief was that though Christians could be indentured for a set period, they could not be reduced to outright slavery. Non-Christians, however, could be enslaved. This would prove untenable. As long as religion was considered a race, evangelism, a fundamental goal of much of Christianity, was squarely at odds with slavery; the more Christianity spread, the fewer people could be bought, sold and owned.
In what would be the first of many disappointing compromises, the Church allowed the passage of a 1667 Virginia law guaranteeing that Christian baptism would not “alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedom.” The law was a win-win for both the spread of Christianity and of slavery. Once passed, the Church would then declare that all enslaved men and women “brought or imported into this country, either by sea or land, whether Negroes, Moors [Muslims], Mollatoes or Indians... shall be converted to the Christian faith.”
What emerged was a version of Christianity that could coexist alongside slavery; one that sought to save souls, and at the same time, reap the economic benefits of exploitation. These forced conversions nearly expunged Islam, the world’s second largest religion, from our shores. Islam, however, was far from the only non-Christian religion present in America’s early days. Buddhism, both as formal religion and spiritual practice, had been and remains a prominent shaping influence of every aspect of American spirituality.
Arriving at Jamestown with the immigrants who brought it here, subsequent contact with Asia would further integrate it into American culture. By the 1840s, Americans and Europeans, returning from travels to the east, were increasingly bringing Buddhism with them; its influences showing up in literary works, from Walt Whitman to Henry Thoreau to Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Likewise, Spaniard, Elias Legarde, who arrived at Jamestown in 1621, is but one example of Jewish presence in the “New World” 150 years before the American Revolution. By the mid-1600s, there was a thriving Jewish community in New Amsterdam (modern day New York), followed by others throughout New England. An estimated 100 Jewish men served in the Continental army, and Haym Salomon, a Polish Jew who immigrated to America in 1772, was not only a member of the Sons of Liberty but was one of the Revolution’s greatest financial backers.
Additionally, American culture was influenced by other faith traditions, including previously mentioned Sikhism, as well as the profound influence of both Indigenous and Traditional African spirituality; including the ways they shaped, and subsequently, were folded into then-contemporary Christian beliefs. Historian Yuval Noah Harari, in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, describes how syncretism is pervasive in Christianity. “Monotheism,” he states, “As it has played out in history, is a kaleidoscope of monotheist, dualist, polytheist and animist legacies, jumbling together under a single divine umbrella. The average Christian believes in the monotheist God, but also in the dualist Devil, in the polytheist saints, and in animist ghosts.”
It’s here that many of us start to wonder if this is taking things too far. “I get ethnic diversity,” we say, “But religious diversity??” This especially causes us misgivings if we’ve been taught that our faith tradition represents the true, and perhaps only, path to God. By applying the same hierarchical structure built into the ARC, we find ourselves declaring that our faith group holds the “truest” truth; that we’re closest to God, and that the further the beliefs of other groups are from ours, the less valid they are. Take my experience. The unspoken sentiment among many of my fellow Southern Baptist ministers was that ecumenical activities were largely a waste of time. In that framework, only other Evangelicals have the “true” truth.
On the next rung would be mainline Protestantism, thought of as more legitimate than the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox church, both of whom, by believing in Christ are deemed closer to the truth than Judaism, which is apparently closer than Islam, which, as an Abrahamic faith, is supposedly truer than Eastern religions, all of whom are presumably more valid than Paganism, which is, according to them, better than atheism. Other bodies who declare themselves God’s authoritative intermediaries here on earth have similar frameworks, of course, with them at the top.
But this path is rife with dangers; not the least of which is the sin of smug self-assurance. Then, there’s the violence. The step from asserting that only we are God’s favorite to weaponizing our faith is a small one. That’s what happened in the late 1960s. Clergy began explicitly teaching congregants that being a member of the faithful meant being a soldier in the coming war for the soul of America; one that had the same goals as most other wars; the elimination of one’s rivals and the absorption of that rival’s assets, and its people.
From the land of Canaan to the Land of Opportunity, our history repeatedly reveals to us how this approach, this kicking against the goads of diversity, creates the exact problems we hope to solve. First, we become facilitators of a culture where verbal violence is normative; a tragic outcome given the humanitarian ethos we claim our respective faiths are built on. Our preemptive actions turn those who could have been friends into foes, allies into enemies; and by making society hostile toward others, we create an environment that compels others to do the same to us.
The second problem is worse: If we are somehow successful at eliminating our rivals, we all pay the price. Just as our personal diversity benefits all of us, so does religious diversity. One of faith systems’ most important functions is holding and transferring all manner of wisdom, cultural technology and social learning to future generations. Everything from the advances in medicine that Africans brought to America, to Quakers’ moral stand against the slavery industry, to the 26 Catholic monasteries that worked together to hide European Jews, to the Beloved Community at the core of the Civil Rights movement, to Buddhism-inspired Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, was encoded in, and passed on through faith systems. When we eliminate them, we also eliminate the gift they could have been to us. Once this wisdom and the systems that held it are gone, like the loss of our oceans’ marine life, it is we who are lesser for it.
But perhaps worst of all is what it does to us as people. Like other social institutions, religions have a primary orientation, a focus, a core reason for existing. They were created to benefit us, to serve us and to help us both be better and live better. And early on, they, like most institutions, do their job well; helping us see how being better people, forging community, facing our fears, strengthening our resolve, and passing on accumulated knowledge and wisdom to the next generation, leads to a fulfilled life. But over time, that orientation can gradually flip, from serving us to us serving them. As the focus of our faith systems shift from blessing to blaming, from humanity to hierarchy, and from conscience to conformity, both what we do and what we deem acceptable to do to others changes.
Our actions become increasingly inhumane, our attitudes increasingly toxic, and in reversing its focus, we disable one of religion’s core functions; to sound the alarm when our humanity is in danger. It’s because of this that people are increasingly opting to leave these institutions behind, and how, today, we’ve become a society where the majority religious affiliation is “none”.
Diversity among America’s Founders
Even the men we refer to as our Founding Fathers, whether they realized it or not, owed much of their success to diversity. While Most were English, that’s essentially where the similarities end. They’d grown up in different places, were educated in different ways, followed different faith paths, were of different classes, and even differed in terms of family history in the colonies. Their diversity, manifest in everything from the values they held to the insights they brought, made the unlikely success of the American Revolution possible.
Take John Adams, a direct descendant of Puritans who came to the American wilderness in the 1630s. Having a profound influence on American culture, laws and traditions of their region, Puritans envisioned themselves as a new Israel, with the shores of America as their promised land away from England, their modern day Egypt. Their calling was to establish an epicenter of human goodness, a city on a hill. It was this and other sensibilities, along with a deep commitment to liberty and justice (not to mention a dogged determination) that John brought to the assembly of founders.
However, some of his most important contributions didn’t originate with him, but rather with his wife, Abigail; his most trusted advisor and strongest source of guidance. In fact, her influence was so great that some consider her an actual Founding Father in her own right. For instance, in March 1776, Abigail wrote the entire Continental Congress, stating: “Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”
Then, there’s Alexander Hamilton. Born out of wedlock in the West Indies to a Scottish father and an English/French mother, young Alexander, left alone when his mother died, received no support from his father. He was cared for by an older cousin, and later, by a local merchant family. A group of wealthy men from around town, recognizing his potential, sponsored his attendance at King’s College; now known as Columbia University. While John Adams could trace his lineage in what would be the US back 150 years, Alexander came here as a college student.
When King’s College closed down during the city’s British occupation, he joined a militia and built a provincial artillery where he was commissioned captain. Serving as senior aide to military commander-in-chief George Washington, he was instrumental in intelligence, effectively conveying Washington’s plans to his generals and back. It was his unconventional background that equipped Alexander with the skills to excel in such chaos and dynamism, and that, over time, would allow him, though one of the youngest Founding Fathers, to also be among the most influential.
Alternately, there’s Benjamin Franklin, who was 70 at the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Born in 1706, he’d already lived a full and colorful life by the time the revolution occurred. But this didn’t stop him from pouring himself into the cause, and many believe that if not for his prudent guidance, the independence effort would have been abandoned, if not stillborn. In addition to his intelligence, he, as one of the oldest and most well-traveled Founders, brought the kind of vital wisdom that only comes with experience. Though never formally trained in any particular field, he was a polymath with genius-level proficiencies in everything from science to political theory to human behavior.
He was a prolific author and inventor, including, of course, his work on electricity, and he spoke five languages. Perhaps more than anyone else, he, by his actions, words and manner, gave definition to an emerging American ethos, one that was a combination of practical values like hard work, community spirit, self-governance, tolerance, egalitarianism and no small amount of humor. Journalist Walter Isaacson described Franklin as the most accomplished American of his era, and “the most influential in inventing the type of society America would become.”
The age range of the Founding Fathers at the signing of the Declaration of Independence included signers ranging from 15 years old to 81. 70-year-old Benjamin Franklin was second oldest; 19-year-old Alexander Hamilton, the second youngest. There was also significant religious diversity among the group, from Deists to Anglicans, Catholics, Unitarians, the gamut of Protestants, plus a significant number of “none of the above”.
Historian Gregg Frazer argues that many of the most influential Founders, Adams, Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, Morris, Washington and Wilson, fit neither the Christian nor Deist mold, but rather, something that was both a hybrid of the two and at the same time, something different from them both; providing a prominent example of how diversity advances humankind.
The Differentiators – An Ex-Slave, an Epileptic, and a Woman
We’re a nation whose machinery has been built, from the ground up, to disqualify diversity. Yet, there are those who overcome; who recognize the very things we deem demerits as merits, and who, rather than let their differences sideline them, embrace them as strengths. There are no better examples of this than George Washington Carver – an ex-slave, Nikola Tesla – an epileptic immigrant, and Mary Anderson – both female and Southern.
George
George Washington Carver was one of the world’s most innovative scientist-inventors. A botanist by training, he is most famous for his research into and promotion of alternatives to soil-depleting cotton crops; including soybeans, sweet potatoes, and, of course, peanuts. As arduous as his life was, George was, by his own account, blessed with a number of benevolent relationships that made everything he did possible. George was born into slavery. Moses Carver had purchased teenage Mary, George’s mother, to help his wife, Susan, on the farm, and when George was only a week old, he and Mary were kidnapped by slave raiders.
Moses hired John Bentley to find them, but Mary had already been sold. Moses traded his horse for sickly George’s return, and after slavery was abolished, he and Susan raised George as their own. This was the first of the significant relationships that dotted George’s life. His adopted mom taught him to read, and they both, realizing that George was intellectually gifted, encouraged him to pursue those gifts. Growing up on the farm, George spent tremendous amounts of time alone and in nature; which is where his love of agriculture began. Later in life, he’d describe flowers as his childhood pets and that, even as a young boy, vegetation seemed to thrive under his touch.
George was eleven when he left home. He moved ten miles south to the neighboring Neosho in order to attend a school for colored children. It was here that he met Mariah Watkins; a second profound influence on George’s development. Mariah, along with her husband, owned the land where the school was housed. They also provided him with lodging and cared for him over his school years. When she asked his name, he identified himself as “Carver’s George”, as he’d always done. She replied that from now on, his name was “George Carver”.
According to George, Mariah, who was a Union nurse in the Civil War, said to him: "You must learn all you can, then go back out into the world and give your learning back to the people". That became an important touchstone for him. George applied to a number of colleges and was accepted at Highland College in Highland, KS. When he arrived, however, his racial identity apparent, he was refused entry. He opted to homestead, manually plowing 17 acres. He ultimately ended up attending Iowa State, where he was both the first African American student and later, the first African American faculty member. In 1896, Booker T. Washington invited George to head the Agriculture department at Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University); which he did for the next 47 years.
From 1915 to 1923, George concentrated on researching and experimenting with new uses for a range of crops far beyond food. These efforts were particularly important given the boll weevil infestation that utterly decimated American cotton. The beetles, spreading at 40 to 160 miles per year, were everywhere. George developed techniques to improve soils damaged by the continual planting of cotton, and through his “movable schools”, helped farmers learn to restore nitrogen to their soils by practicing systematic crop rotation with crops that were both good for the soil and useful to us.
From the peanut alone, George developed more than 100 products; from cosmetics to dyes, paints, plastics, gasoline and nitroglycerin. He published agricultural bulletins on his innovations, articles in peanut industry journals, and wrote a syndicated newspaper column, "Professor Carver's Advice". But George wasn’t just a genius inventor; he believed in a better America; which is why he spent four years touring historically white Southern colleges for the Commission on Interracial Cooperation.
In 1916, George was made a member of the Royal Society of Arts in England; one of very few Americans to receive this honor. He was friends with fellow inventor Henry Ford, and Henry even installed an elevator at the Institute so that an elderly George didn’t have to climb the stairs. The Crown Prince of Sweden spent a one-month intensive under George’s tutelage. He was friends with Mahatma Gandhi and traveled to India to advise him on nutrition in developing nations. He testified before Congress. He was sought out by and gave advice to three American presidents, Teddy Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge and FDR, and in 1941, Time magazine named him the “Black Leonardo da Vince”.
"Patriarch George Washington Carver, who hobbles benignly about Tuskegee's campus, is an artist," the article began. "But he is better known as the greatest Negro scientist alive, the man who pioneered new uses for Southern agricultural products, developed 285 new uses for the peanut, got 118 products, including vinegar, molasses and shoe blacking, from the South's surplus sweet potatoes. In his laboratory he and his assistants also make paints and dyes from the red Alabama clay, the oil of the Alabama peanut, with which he paints the natural phenomena he sees around him: birds, fruit, flowers, mountain vistas."
Nikola
From the beginning, Nikola Tesla epitomized diversity. Of Serbian ancestry, he was born in modern-day Croatia in 1856 to a father who was an orthodox priest and a mother who was the daughter of an orthodox priest. The fourth of five children, Nikola had an older brother and three sisters.
When his brother was killed in a horseback accident, his father wanted more than ever for him to become a priest, but Nikola, already a scientific and mathematical prodigy, wanted a different life. Throughout childhood, he was beset by numerous life-threatening illnesses and was bedridden for weeks at a time. He also suffered from a physical disability, seizures that often involved blinding flashes of light and visions; ones that proved instrumental to his work for the rest of his life.
He was in his late twenties when he immigrated to America to work for Thomas Edison and he became a naturalized United States citizen about seven years later. Nikola was generally characterized as asocial by those who knew him, though he was well-liked and counted people like Mark Twain and Julian Hawthorne among his friends. Julian, describing Nikola, wrote, "Seldom did one meet a scientist or engineer who was also a poet, a philosopher, an appreciator of fine music, a linguist, and a connoisseur of food and drink."
From childhood, he spent a tremendous amount of time alone and focused on his studies, designs and ideas. This largely self-imposed isolation paired with an eidetic memory, his creativity, and the unique way his mind worked, made for a potent combination, and allowed Nikola to become an expert in a vast array of subjects. He spoke eight languages, memorized complete books, and as a teenager, could perform integral calculus in his head.
Nikola Tesla is credited with some of the most profound scientific advancements in modern history, including the invention of AC (alternating current), the science behind wireless communications, radio and X-ray imaging. Over his lifetime, he obtained over 300 patents in twenty-six countries, and many of his inventions were never patented.
Mary
Mary Anderson was an unusual woman for her time. She was a successful real estate developer, viticulturist and businesswoman, and inventor of the windshield wiper. And she is the very personification of the term, “American ingenuity.” Born in Greene County, Alabama, in 1866, one year after the conclusion of the Civil War, by age 22, she, her sister and her widowed mother had relocated to Birmingham.
Founded just sixteen years prior in 1871, but with a population of 26,000 and counting, Birmingham was already one of the largest and the fastest growing city in the South. There, she built the still-standing, Fairmont Apartments on Highland Avenue (incidentally, located right down the hill from the high school I attended), before eventually moving cross-country to Fresno, California, where she owned and ran a successful cattle ranch and vineyard.
On a visit to New York City in 1903, she noted that the motorman drove with the front window open because of the difficulty of keeping the windshield clear of falling snow and sleet. Periodically, he’d reach his arm out the window and use his sleeve to clear the windshield. Upon returning to Alabama, she hired a designer to help her develop a hand-operated device to keep the windshield clear, then, she had a local company produce a working model. She applied for and received a 17-year patent for the “windshield wiper”.
Mary was adventurous, curious, and unafraid to pursue a goal – even in areas that were generally considered to be man’s work. We don’t know much about her personal life, but given that she never married or had any known relationships, it’s believed she was some version of what, today, we’d describe as “LGBTQ+”. This diversity, Mary’s own adventurous spirit, and having lost her father at an early age, all likely contributed to the deep sense of agency that allowed her to traverse the country, launch new ventures, and achieve success in so many areas at a time when most women stayed home and stayed put.
Her windshield wiper device consisted of a lever inside the vehicle that controlled a rubber blade on the outside. The lever could be operated to cause the spring-loaded arm to move back and forth across the glass. A counterweight was used to ensure contact between the wiper and the window. Though similar devices had been made earlier, hers was the first to prove effective.
In 1905, Mary tried to sell the rights to her invention through a prominent Canadian brokerage, but they rejected her application saying "we do not consider it to be of such commercial value as would warrant our undertaking its sale." People scoffed at Mary’s invention, saying that the wipers’ movement would distract the driver and cause accidents, and Mary was never successful at selling the patent.
Nevertheless, by the early 1920s, windshield wipers using Mary’s design had become standard equipment on automobiles. Upon her death many years later, The New York Times carried her obituary, crediting her for her invention, and in 2011, Mary was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
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In the end, it’s astounding how much we owe to George, Nikola and Mary, and to so many others we’ve dismissed because they’re different; distilling them down to the labels we affix to them – including as ex-slave, epileptic, or woman – as if this somehow invalidates them. But it doesn’t. In fact, it’s those very differences – our unique traits, the trials we face, and the way we face them – that empower us to not just emancipate ourselves, but inspire others, and in the process, leave the world itself better than we found it.
The Crux of Diversification
Our shared story has, in myriad ways, always been so much more diverse than our telling of it. Take the 100 or so Africans who arrived here in 1526, almost a century before the Pilgrims. Though brought as part of a slave contingent on a Spanish boat, they wouldn’t be slaves for long. Staging a coordinated revolt, they set fire to the leader’s house, killed him, melted into the forest, and took up new lives among the natives. There was the steady stream of European entrepreneurs and fortune-seekers, debtors and refugees, pilgrims and asylees; all intent on carving out their own little place in the world.
Even the names they gave their settlements reflected diversity; from tributes to places in their homelands (New Orleans (France), Haarlem (Holland), Hamburg (Germany), and New Smyrna (Greece), to “new” versions of their home countries – New England, New France, New Spain, and New Sweden. And that’s before getting to all the names adopted from indigenous nations – Alabama and Oklahoma, New Mexico and California, Hawaii and the Dakotas – names given to these places long before Europeans knew they existed.
Think of all the myriad other ways diversity was at the core of our becoming. For instance, the women who contributed just as much, if not more, to the forming of America as did men (and it’s to our shame that we have no collective memory of our Founding Mothers). Or, of the love sown into the very land itself, by those who came before us. There are all the diverse forms of family, from nuclear to extended, from unmarried partners to fostered kin, that have always existed within our borders.
And there are the members of the LGBTQ+ community who, long before they were recognized as such, were here, shaping and contributing to every aspect of the American story. Art collectors and spouses Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell, in 2020, published LOVING. A Photographic History of Men in Love, which portrays male couples in hundreds of photographs taken during the 100-year period between the 1850s and 1950s.
The collection of 2,800 photos, the result of a twenty-year effort in cultural excavation, was astonishing in both diversity (from 19th century laborers to 20th century executives, working class and professionals, artists and academics, soldiers and scientists, of all ages and ethnicities) and their breadth; spanning from the Civil War, through WWII, and into the 1950s. Another example of the Dillingham Flaw, LOVING is an undeniable reminder that we’ve always been far more diverse than our boxes allowed, and that we’ve always been better off for it. And that’s the crux of diversification; it is the gear that turns the cosmos. Everything that exists or that comes into existence, from a newborn baby to a newborn star, does so in a state of change.
To exist is to be in motion, going somewhere, becoming something. And every becoming makes it possible for yet other things to exist. So, when we seek to stop its advance, to rail against it by creating categories that enforce conformity and require homogeneity, we only succeed in creating spaces where we ourselves can’t breathe; splintering ourselves into ever-increasing factions. It is because of this that the Catholic Church, 600 years after having been declared Rome’s state religion, would splinter, with both factions claiming to be the “One, Holy, Apostolic Church.” Then, in the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Church would split again. Then, Protestants would diverge into over 200 denominations from Anabaptists to Schwenkfelders, then, each of those would split; which is how Baptists, my own denomination, ended up with 50-plus distinct variations claiming the name.
Diversity simply cannot be stopped. But we can, by how we perceive of and engage with it, leave our societies shattered and ourselves poorer, rather than stronger and richer for it. All of us alive today are participants in what might be the grandest social experiment in the history of humankind. We live in an era where virtually every society is multicultural and multi-religious, multiethnic and multi-generational, where combinations and variations are the norm, where preexisting constructs are being deconstructed, and where complexity is multiplying; all in an increasingly mobile and interconnected global community. This is the reality the Alphas were born into and is what they see when they view the world.
As such, the United States might be in rare company as a nation birthed by people from virtually every other nation, but today, there is almost nowhere we can go and live out our lives surrounded only by those with whom we claim common lineage; our prescribed tribe.
That leaves us with a choice; seek to impede our continual diversification or embrace it as one of our most potent gifts, pine for the relative simplicity of our past or become co-creators of a powerful future. We Americans might have given frameworks like whiteness and the ARC to the world, but they were perversions of the gift we could have given – that of allness.
In reality, this commitment to embrace both manyness and oneness has always been our greatest strength, and the better at it we get, the stronger, more vibrant and more sustainable we will be. It’s in this sense that America is a nation built for diversity, and that the world’s diversity, in turn, built America.
I. The Three ages (or beginning of the end)
Chapter 4 - A New kind of nation (age of promise - part 3) (expand)
Chapter 4 - A New kind of nation (age of promise - part 3) (expand)
Life on the Ground – There’s a Place for Us
I can still remember it. I was sitting in my middle school American History class and came across a photo of a painting; the same one referenced earlier, JE Taylor's pictorial representation of the Battle of Bunker Hill; the one with Peter Salem firing his rifle at British Royal Marine officer Major Pitcairn. I remember staring at it, the first visual image I’d ever seen that included anyone other than people of obvious English ancestry in the events of our founding. But what shocked me just as much was realizing that I held an assumption; one that I’d never thought to question.
Somewhere along the way, I’d unconsciously embraced a devastating and disempowering false narrative; that brown-skinned people played no part in the Revolution; that we simply weren’t there. All my life, I’d had this feeling I couldn’t name, and that I didn’t know even had a name. The feeling I’d been struggling with was displacement, and that picture was, for me, the beginning of addressing it, of writing diversity back into history.
This process of re-finding my place in this story would prove to be multifaceted and ongoing. It’s what I experienced in college when I took the Myers Briggs Type Inventory, and discovered that I’m an INFP – introvert, intuitive, feeling, and perceiving. It didn’t matter to me that in a society that values extroversion (outward focus), sensing (concreteness), thinking (facts) and judging (deciding quickly), that all four of my traits were “unpreferred” – especially for males – nor that only about 1% of the population shared my personality profile.
I’d long known I was an outlier. But what the inventory gave me was a sense of belonging; even if INFPs were as few as they claimed, I was a type. There was a place for me. I had a similar experience regarding handedness. Back in 2nd grade, I had a teacher who told me, the only left-hander in the class, that she didn’t know how to teach “someone like me” how to write. So, when adult me stumbled upon a whimsical novelty store at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, I was surprised that things like left-handed scissors made me feel affirmed and validated in a way that, until that moment, I didn’t know I needed. As a result, to this day, I take the time to acknowledge fellow lefties; appreciating that our minds work differently.
Then, there was the discovery of Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell’s picture book, LOVING, which impacted me as much as the painting with Peter Salem; an equally powerful affirmation; especially as someone who identifies as LGBTQ. Of course, it makes sense that they were there, doing their part to build our nation. We’re a society that acts as if gay people didn’t exist before Stonewall, and that if they did, they made no real contributions. But nothing could be less true.
That was especially evident in the photo of two Negro servicemen in uniform, one resting his chin on the shoulder of the other. It challenged so many of our stereotypes, about gay African American men, about gay men in the military, and about gay men forming couple relationships long before coming out was a thing. Something about seeing them also made me feel seen. And that’s why heritage months and talking about our diverse history is so important.
It’s what makes Iowa schoolteacher Jane Elliott’s choice, on April 4, 1968, to help her students understand the prejudice that had led to Martin’s murder earlier that same evening; to not just talk about it, but help them feel it, so profound. “It’s a fact,” she told them after explaining the exercise and getting into character, “Blue-eyed people are better than brown-eyed people.” And that was really all it took. “I watched what had been marvelous, cooperative, wonderful, thoughtful children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating little third graders in a space of 15 minutes.”
In A Class Divided, the students, now adults, came together for a reunion. And each of them talked about how that one lesson changed their lives for the better, and that as tough as it was to go through, how grateful they were to walk, if only for an hour, in the shoes of the unpreferred. Something unimaginably powerful happens when we acknowledge the place of others; we find ourselves also affirmed and acknowledged.
The exact same day that Jane was leading her children in the exercise, the Supremes were in New York City performing a heart-rending version of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s Somewhere (There’s a Place for Us), live on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, also in Martin’s honor. The timeless lyrics of the song, written a decade earlier for West Side Story, paired with Diana’s reverent delivery, could not have been more moving. It evoked images of that same Promised Land Martin had spoken of just two nights prior in his sermon, when he shared of having been to the mountaintop. “There’s a place for us,” Diana sang. .
Somewhere a place for us. Peace and quiet and open air, wait for us, somewhere. There's a time for us, someday a time for us. Time together with time to spare, time to learn, time to care; someday, somewhere. We'll find a new way of living; we'll find a way of forgiving, somewhere… There's a place for us, a time and place for us. Hold my hand and we're halfway there; hold my hand and I'll take you there – somehow, some day, somewhere.
“Yes, there's a place for each of us,” she said during the song’s interlude, with the other Supremes humming in the background. “And we must try to pursue this place, where love is like a passion that burns like a fire. Let our efforts be as determined as those of Dr. Martin Luther King, who had a dream that all God's children, black men, white men, Jews, Gentiles, Protestants, and Catholics, could join hands and sing that spiritual old hymn: ‘Free at last, great God, free at last.’”
In that moment, this overwhelmingly white-identifying audience, many, for the first time, began to learn what Jane Elliott’s third-grade class was also learning; how Martin’s death the night before was not just a loss for African Americans but for all Americans, how we’re all caught up together in this inescapable network of mutuality, and how this long-dreamt-of place is a place not just for some of us, but for all of us. When the Supremes finished, the deafening applause was instant, as was the standing ovation.
DEMOCRACY - Sustainable Societies Key Ingredient #2
O, let America be America again, the land that never has been yet, and yet must be – The land where every man is free. I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars. I am the red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek – and finding only the same old stupid plan, of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak. The land that's mine – the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME – who made America, whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, must bring back our mighty dream again. O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, and yet I swear this oath – America will be! – Langston Hughes – Let America be America Again
The core premise of the Enlightenment, that society should be structured based on reason rather than doctrine and that societal order should be rooted in civil, rather than religious law, forever changed us; both how we thought of ourselves and ordered our societies. The ideas underpinning democracy, a previously unimaginable socio-evolutionary leap forward, spread around the world, upending tiered social systems that had existed throughout human history almost instantly. All of a sudden, humankind was dreaming of what could be, instead of settling for what had always been.
Then, there’s the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment’s predecessor, which changed us in equally significant ways, upending humankind’s most foundational paradigm – the belief that the Earth was the center of the universe, and we, its masters. Instead, we’d come to realize that the Earth is a planet, a rather small one that, contrary to everything our senses tell us, is in constant motion, both rotating on its axis and revolving around the sun. In one fell swoop, the Earth (and by extension, humankind) had fallen from the crown of creation to a rather insignificant blip caught up in the wake of our smallish star, floating somewhere out on the edge of one of 200 billion galaxies. But as humbling as this stunning realization was, it was also quite liberating; the same knowledge that rendered all of us insignificant also made us, greatest to smallest, equals.
These shifts led to other shifts. Take divine rights, of kings and the Church, to rule. Not only was it universally accepted; we’d never even thought to question it. That is, until the introduction of a paradigm-shattering idea; that rulers rule only by the consent of (and therefore, are accountable to) the governed. This single thought shifted the power from rulers to the people. The American Revolution, thanks to people like Franklin and Jefferson, was deeply influenced by this thinking; evident in both how issues were framed and how governance was structured, and by Madison, who drew heavily from the Enlightenment in writing the Constitution.
Similarly, the Pilgrims, upon arriving safely off the coast of modern Provincetown, MA, drafted and signed their very own shared commitment to “equal and just laws”. That document, the Mayflower Compact, is generally believed to be the beginning of democracy in the “New World”. But for the idea of democracy itself, we’d borrow from the source; the Athenians, who, around the sixth century BC, invented what’s often described as the first such governance system in the world.
It’s from them that we even got the word dēmokratia, which, derived from demos (“the people”), and kratos (“rule”), meant, “the people rule”, “rule of the people” or put another way, “self-rule”. One way of grasping democracy is envisioning a nation where the people themselves are the rule-makers, rule-keepers, and rule enforcers; or, as described by President Lincoln, “government of the people, by the people, for the people”. Of course, like with most things, we’d take the concept and make it our own, both embracing new ideas (segregation of powers, universal civil liberties and religious freedom, equal voting rights, people-chosen leadership, just courts, and accountable governance) and following real-world examples like the Iroquois League; a form of governance where power was shared between a federal body and respective states.
Democracy is the foundation of a society with staying power. The concept of self-rule disperses the role of governance to all and is the means by which a more perfect union is formed. The system, when truly practiced, creates societal stability in two key ways. First, it counteracts nepotism in positions of power, and second, it keeps us honest; everyone gets a vote and a voice, and every citizen who desires to do so, can run for office. Or, at least that’s how it should work.
As a concept, democracy might be the greatest social invention of humankind since we started forming primitive societies. It is also arguably the most advanced, so much so that today, true democracy still remains more aspirational than actualized; partly because a system where governance is shared by all is a system where unequal power is held by none, including by those who have grown accustomed to rolls of the dice falling perpetually in their favor.
Theoretically, we get that systems dedicated to collective thriving are fundamentally incompatible with ones that advantage only some. But practically, we find ourselves drawn to both; praying for the former while pursuing the latter. Which is exactly how we end up here, trying to look like a democracy without actually being one. But this path was chosen long before we got to things like policy. Our course was set the moment we rendered verdict on equality, and whether we really believed in it.
Equality
Don't you know, they're talkin' 'bout a revolution? It sounds like a whisper. Cause, finally, the tables are starting to turn, talkin’ bout a revolution, oh, talkin’ bout a revolution. – Tracy Chapman, Talkin’ Bout a Revolution
“And we hold these truths to be self-evident…” These profound concepts articulated in the Declaration describe potent principles that undergird much of the world’s civic structure. That all are created equal, “Are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”, and that these rights include “Life, Liberty and pursuit of Happiness.” Intended as an unambiguous avowal that this would not only be a new nation but a new kind of nation, this singular statement, a renunciation of the Old World tradition of structuring people, from birth, into classes was a radical departure from any way in which civilizations had viewed themselves prior to this era.
America has British philosopher Thomas Hobbs to thank for many of these revolutionary concepts. In his seminal work, Leviathan, written in 1651, before any of the American Founders were born, Hobbs asserted the radical notion that society exists, not because of the will of kings or deities, but because of an agreement that we’ve all entered into; implicitly or explicitly. This radical idea, referred to today as Social Contract Theory, made each member of society an empowered participant, and served as the foundation for much of modern political philosophy and, especially, western political theory.
The assertion that people are fundamentally equal might be the slipperiest of these core ideas, and the one most easy to get wrong. For those of us in the group that has more, the temptation is to use our abundance as retroactive justification: The fact that we have more must mean that we’re worth more. Or, “If we have it, we must deserve to have it.” Then, the rest of society chimes in like Motown backup singers. Magazines like Fortune and Forbes describe the wealth in billionaires’ possession as what they’re “worth”. But that’s not really what they’re worth. That’s what they have – whether they actually deserve to have it or not.
In reality, any society structured to enrich a segment of us by impoverishing the rest of us is not only inherently unequal but is already failing. Historian Arnold J. Toynbee, in 1961, theorized that all societies pass through distinct stages, including genesis, growth, time of troubles, universal state, and disintegration. He argued that civilizations tend to fall, not because of environmental factors or attacks from the outside, but because they become incapable of solving new problems.
According to his theory, the very people we once thought of as superior – whether in intellect, creativity, wealth or some other quality – in an effort to maintain dominance, end up forming the very barriers that prevent society from adapting, and thus, surviving. Essentially, they commit suicide. The ultimate sign, according to Toynbee, that a civilization has lost all coherence is when it enters Stage Four, where the dominant group forms what he calls a “universal state”: the attempt to hold, by force and “against all right and reason – a position of inherited privilege which it has ceased to merit.” Anyone looking can see how this applies to where we are today; how we’re unwittingly engineering society’s fall by corroding the very structures that sustain it.
In our tendency to discount the inherent inestimable value that each person brings, we reduce the idea of equality to mere leveling effect, the process of distribution where we even out the highs and lows so that everyone gets the same amount. But that’s setting the bar too low. The line where equality resides is not the average: It’s somewhere beyond the fifth standard deviation. What makes us equal is not a regression to the mean. It’s the priceless, often untapped potential inherent in every person. It’s the recognition that we’re all invaluable, and all, as one of my minister friends put it, “fractional reflections of God”. An enduring belief in equality enables us to create a society where anyone and everyone can achieve their potential, which, in turn, is how societies survive.
Put more practically, the degree to which a collective believes in equality can be seen in its lived experience; the degree to which all are validated and fairness is universal. This is what we mean by an equitable society; one that recognizes everyone’s inestimable worth, and that therefore enables them to live into their diversity, make their special contribution, and to thrive. Equality, by its very nature, counteracts preferentialism, discrimination and bias, and, at the same time, engenders confidence in society itself. Without it, we lose our sense of collective “we”; the ideals that hold us together and make us real start to fray, before eventually deteriorating altogether.
A “free-born” democracy like America had an advantage. It didn’t have to migrate to a platform of inherent equality; that’s where we started. But it might also be a disadvantage. We’ve never had to go through the hard work of becoming something else. The question before us is whether we, a society that’s allowed its commitment to equality to falter, can find our own way back.
HUMANITY - Sustainable Societies Key Ingredient #3
One evening, a Cherokee elder told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, "My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all. One is hatred, envy, jealousy, greed, arrogance, resentment and hard-heartedness. The other is love, kindness, goodness, compassion, faith, hope and honor." The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: "Which wolf wins?" His grandfather simply replied, "The one you feed." – Indigenous American Proverb
I look behind my ears for the green, even my sweat smells clean, glare off the white hurts my eyes. Gotta get out of bed, get a hammer and a nail; learn how to use my hands, not just my head; I think myself into jail. Now I know a refuge never grows, from a chin in a hand in a thoughtful pose; gotta tend the earth if you want a rose. – Indigo Girls, Hammer And A Nail
If there’s one thread that weaves unbroken throughout this entire book, it is that of humanity and its prevailing necessity. Humanity can be described as our ability to think, feel, act and react in ways that are consistent with humankind at its best. It’s about conducting ourselves in such a way that both we and others are better off afterward than before. We all harbor dual impulses, the ability to behave humanely and inhumanely. As such, much of life is about deciding which impulses we will embrace.
Consistently living a life marked by humanity might very well be the greatest challenge we can undertake. Doing so requires that we consistently turn away from primitive instincts that come so naturally to us, and to instead choose to strengthen those capabilities that make us more than we’ve been. Humanity is the catalyst of society. It provides us with the ability to outgrow our own self-destructive tendencies and upgrade the behaviors we consider normal. It breathes life into communities and makes them places where that life can thrive.
Later, we’ll explore the Four Actions and how they strengthen both our level of humanity and the consistency with which it is manifested. For now, the goal is to simply provide a bit more color regarding how advancing humanity changes us. Any of us, if we take the time, can recall any number of ways in which another’s humanity has helped us become who we are today. Some of those things were monumental; the saving of a life, helping someone survive a tragedy, or the loved ones who made huge sacrifices on our behalf.
But humanity shines through just as powerfully through small things; especially when done by a stranger. It’s the African American man who sheltered a Euro American girl with his umbrella, a co-ed lugging a huge suitcase, and who stood there weeping after having been ignored by the hotshot Wall Street exec she’d begged not to poach her cab. He then stood out in the rain and flagged her down another one.
It’s the woman who dutifully acknowledges people suffering from homelessness as human beings, or the person who allowed a woman and her 6-year-old daughter to pack a basket with $40 worth of groceries, then, paid for them, and let the little girl pick out the candy bar of her choice. It’s the person who pays the bridge toll of the driver behind them, or the woman who bought clothes for a little boy working outside a Birmingham grocery store.
Humanity improves how we perceive things; how we look at the world, others and ourselves. It’s the expanding of our consciousness to grasp that which is not immediately obvious; seeing the worth in others that others might overlook; and anticipating the ripple effects of our actions and the things we set in motion. Humanity engages our hearts. It’s both feeling with and caring for others; seeing ourselves in them and them in us. It’s seeking to understand why they’ve made the choices they’ve made, and how, in similar situations, we’d likely make similar choices.
It means extending forgiveness (both to them and to ourselves) and bravely advocating on behalf of those who need it. Humanity fosters beauty. It inspires us to make art and make music, to imagine and aspire. It’s the source of our ability to give comfort and find joy, and to appreciate them wherever we see them. Like the color purple that Shug, in Alice Walker’s book of the same name, encouraged us to not overlook. It’s through humanity that we reify those things we otherwise only dream of. It enables us to inject both wonder into our lives and meaning into our existence.
Humanity renews our souls. It validates our worth and gives voice to that inner part of us where we are most alive, inspiring us to become that better version of ourselves and to lead our best lives. It is this strengthening of our spiritual core that allows us to outgrow hubris and self-inflation, to awaken our conscience and to live in peace; both with others and ourselves. It’s what my friend Nick exhibited at every turn. While we understand its value in theory, making it real requires, as the Indigo Girls reminded us, getting our hands in the dirt, and allowing it to manifest in our day-to-day lives. Which, as a people, means holding one another close and our sense of unity high.
Unity
“Unity to be real must stand the severest strain without breaking.” Mahatma Gandhi
“Won't it be wonderful when black history and Native American history and Jewish history and all of U.S. history is taught from one book. Just U.S. history.” Maya Angelou
It was great Roman philosopher Cicero in De Officiis, who stated, “When each person loves the other as much as himself, it makes one out of the many (unas fiat ex pluribus). This reference (or at least this era) is thought to be the point of origin for E pluribus unum – the motto adopted as the Great Seal by America’s first Congress in 1776, and which means, “out of many, one”.
Both many and one. (It’s also worth noting that it’s not sameness – whether of opinion or ancestry, religion or politics – that makes one out of the many. It’s love. According to Cicero, that’s the great unifier.) The adoption of this idea was as critical to our survival as was farming: it united us, while allowing us to maintain our individuality; our diversity. The people of this new land could build a united nation while remaining separate states, craft a common spiritual ethos while practicing different faiths, and create a singular culture while expressing many ethnicities.
This is how a common identity was forged; moving from being thirteen colonies to being one nation. With this notion came other important concepts like solidarity (we are all in this together), allegiance (all Americans, regardless of how they differ, are my kin), fidelity (a willingness to make sacrifices for one’s country) and commitment to the commonwealth, or common well-being.
From culture to religion, non-religion, ancestry, ethnicity, languages etc., we Americans had more differences than similarities. We therefore needed something other than prescribed “sameness” to tie us together. What emerged was a commitment to the dream of what America could become; what it could mean for humankind. It was a pledge, not just to the America that was, but to the America that could be, and to be, as Cicero said, a land where “each person loves the other as much as himself”.
While diverse societies have, by far, better chances of adapting and sustaining, they also tend to be more vulnerable at the onset, and when approaching major demographic shifts (like the one we’re facing now). This is because of two reasons: The first is the challenge of the many; the lack of a dominant culture makes maintaining common ground, oneness, far more difficult. The second is a shortcoming of human nature; our lessening regard for those beyond our personal circle; in other words, we find it harder to care about strangers than people we know.
That’s why we’re less affected by millions of people dying in a far-off land, but profoundly impacted by a few thousand deaths in our own country or even a single death in our neighborhood. But it’s more fundamental than that. For example, in a 1969 study, psychologist Philip Zimbardo took two groups of female students at NYU, giving one group name tags, and the other group anonymized numbers and hoods.
He then asked individuals from both groups to administer shocks to other students. He found that participants were willing to deliver shocks to others that were twice as high when they did so behind hoods, as when their faces were uncovered and their identities known (which also explains the hoods worn by groups like the KKK). Us caring less isn’t just about us not knowing them; it’s also when they don’t know who we are.
His findings are indicative of a state psychologists call “deindividuation"; a condition characterized by a lessening of human regard, paired with a diminished sense of personal accountability. While this can happen in all manner of contexts, anonymity, whether real or perceived, is always a key ingredient. Dr. Zimbardo further suggests that “diffused responsibility, group activity, altered temporal perspective, emotional arousal, and sensory overload” are all input variables that can trigger “deindividuated” reactions.
Societies full of disconnected strangers are ideal environments for deindividuation; something we often experience whenever we get behind the wheel. In a Wired magazine article titled, Big Question: Why Am I a Horrible Person When I Drive? journalist Bryan Gardiner begins: Here's a scenario that should be familiar: You're driving along on the highway. Suddenly, without signaling, a massive SUV comes barreling into your lane from the right, forcing you to jam on the brakes and swerve out of the way to avoid a collision. “Worthless piece of %$#@,” you yell to this person you don't know (and who can't hear you) before embarking on a quest to teach them a lesson by tailgating them for the next two miles…
And while the scenario that Bryan presented is one that most of us can relate to, and one that rarely leads to tragedy, deindividuation can also have far deeper, far more dangerous ramifications, and is a key driver of our nationwide problems with so many minority deaths at the hands of police officers. Amidst calls for things like redirecting some of the policing budget to social services, we also can’t overlook the powerful role that deindividuation, when officers and the other members of the community are strangers, plays.
Both police officers and other community members are subject to responding in ways that they would not if they knew each other, if their siblings played sports together, if they’d been in the same 3rd grade class, if their mothers worked together, if they picked their kids up from the same school, if they shopped at the same grocery stores or frequented the same farmers’ market, or even if they simply knew each other’s names. This familiarity and participation in the community off the job, paired with training and standards on the job, has been shown to dramatically reduce violent incidents, and results are even more dramatic for departments that shift their approach from a focus on process (law enforcement) to one of outcomes (peaceful, cohesive, vital communities).
Whether how we drive, how we police or how we respond to tragedies elsewhere in the world, it turns out that learning to see one another as people, as fellow members of a singular, commonly affected community of which we are also a part, might turn out to be the most important thing we can do to combat deindividuation, and instead, move beyond being a land of strangers to that of a united people.
Life on the Ground – Mary’s Table
In the preface, I shared a bit about Mary, the grandmother who raised me, and how it was my effort to learn to see America as she did, both its beauty and its flaws, that led to this book. Another Mary from Birmingham, she was born fifty years after Mary Anderson, and in a place that would, simply because of her ancestry, deny her so much of what the other Mary was afforded.
For instance, had Mary Anderson been on a bus in Birmingham instead of a trolley in NY, she’d still have been seated close enough to see the driver, and thus come up with her windshield wiper invention. Whereas my Mary would’ve been somewhere back behind the color bar. And that’s just one small window into life in her world. I describe in Me and Mary how she grew up “female and colored, poor and Southern, the daughter of sharecroppers and orphaned,” how she came of age in a time dominated by the likes of the Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind; and that’s before accounting for the devastating impact of the Great Depression.
Yet, despite these burdens of unimaginable weight, in a million small ways, she’d make the lives of everyone around her better, and ensure that our home was a wonderfully warm and happy one. In her and my grandfather’s house, like most Southern families, Sunday dinner was the big meal of the week. It was the only time that most everyone was home, instead of out working, or otherwise coming and going. Mary taught all her children to cook and half of them cooked professionally. Robert, her and my grandfather’s oldest son, was the head chef at Parliament House, Birmingham’s preeminent hotel, and Naomi, her oldest daughter, was one of the city’s most sought-after wedding cake makers.
If you were a Belle who wanted her cake to be so spectacular that it ended up being mentioned in the society pages, Naomi was who you commissioned. But Sunday dinner was Mary’s affair, though everyone pitched in; spending time together as we did. During the week, she made dinner for the family she worked for, then, came home and did the same for us, so those meals were simple; liver on Mondays, spaghetti on Wednesdays, fish on Fridays.
Sundays, however, were another thing altogether. The table was piled high with dishes, each more amazing than the others. There were heaping greens and pot liquor, hot cornbread, her to-die-for buttermilk biscuits and homemade jam, fried chicken and glazed ham, corn on the cob, oven cooked root vegetables, string beans seasoned with onions, black-eyed peas and neck bones, fried green tomatoes and okra, and always two desserts – homemade cake or fresh fruit cobbler, banana pudding or sweet potato pie. Much of this came either from her garden or the gardens of friends; trades of her abundance of tomatoes and peaches for corn and beans.
Looking back, I’m astounded by how many people Mary could feed with so little money. But that was common for folk of her era. Southern food has come of age as of late, but back then, like most innovations, it was born of necessity. I remember being completely surprised when, a few years ago, I saw actual collard greens for sale in the Whole Foods produce section. Though today, touted for their nutritional value, ten years ago, hardly anyone outside the South had even heard of them. But in my childhood, it wasn’t Sunday dinner without collards and cornbread.
Originating near Greece, collards were long an African delicacy, then became part of regional American cuisine at Jamestown. And like the people who brought them here, they can survive and thrive in the most difficult of conditions. That’s likely how they became such a staple so quickly. Then, there’s cornbread. It was Native Americans who taught the rest of us how to grind corn into meal for baking, as well as how to infuse it with an alkali to make hominy, which, in turn, became grits, the porridge that pretty much every Southerner has for breakfast. Over the years, I’d think about the many influences that made that one meal possible; the traditions and heritages, advances and innovations; the tapestry of American culture on display every Sunday afternoon.
My grandmother had two rules; all are welcome and everyone eats their fill. As such, I’m not sure that a table exists that could’ve seated our sprawling assemblage of family, both born and found. So instead, we all crowded into the kitchen for grace, then filled our plates, and sat in groupings spanning from the front porch to the back yard. My grandfather Olden would tune all the radios to the same station so that everyone was listening to the same thing wherever we were, and people would flow, like water, from one conversation to another.
One of the highlights of my grandmother’s life was seeing an African American win the Democratic nomination. (It’s easy for us to forget what an unprecedented moment that was. But just ten years prior, Morgan Freeman had played the president in the disaster film Deep Impact, and even that made news across the nation. So seeing this happen for real seemed almost unimaginable.) I remember, early on in the campaign, making my monthly call on Sunday afternoon, as had long been my habit, which gave me the chance to catch up with almost everyone. It really was the next best thing to being there.
At the time, I was organizing minority ministers and speaking at historically white churches around the country, just as I’d done for Richard Arrington 30 years prior. I could tell by her voice that my grandmother’s health was failing, and I wanted to come home, but she wouldn’t have it. “This is God’s plan for you,” she said, “The work he has for you to do.” She ended that call the same way she always did; “I’m so proud of you.”
In Barack Obama’s Democratic nomination acceptance speech, she’d get to witness what was for her a miracle, including his description of the promise of America as “the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise and fall as one nation, the fundamental belief that I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper.” Mary, like Madelyn, the grandmother who raised Barack, would pass away before the historic election, but so much of her lives on in so many ways. And not a Sunday goes by when I don’t think of her, and how she turned something as simple as a meal into an anchor point for family. I recall the laughter and love, and how she was feeding so much more than our bodies.
I think of those lyrics from Jimmy Webb’s If These Walls Could Speak: They would tell you that I owe you, more than I can ever pay. Here’s someone who really loves you; don’t ever go away – that’s what these walls would say. And instantly, I’m transported back to those old walls in a working-class home in central Birmingham. I’m reminded both of all that I’ve been given and of what, together, we should be striving for; to be a place where all are welcome and everyone eats their fill. Because in the end, these are the things that hold us together, and are the only ones that truly matter.
And Yes, We’ve Just Begun
And when the evening comes, we smile; so much of life ahead. We'll find a place where there's room to grow, and yes, we've just begun. – The Carpenters
Don't let anyone make you disappear, Charlie. – Mr. Ajayi, a gay teacher, to young Charlie Spring, gay protagonist in Netflix's Heartstopper series.
Honey Mahogany, Chair of the SF Democratic Party, in a June 2022 email, described how a contingent of men identifying themselves as members of the Proud Boys disrupted the San Lorenzo library’s Drag Queen Story Hour. "As a Drag Queen Story Hour Queen," she explained, "I am very aware that this could have happened to any one of us. We all received the email asking if we were interested in reading at San Leandro. I keep thinking about how terrified she [Panda Dulce] must have been given what had just happened a few weeks prior at Uvalde” (the shooting tragedy where 17 kids and 2 teachers were killed).
Honey continued, “I also can’t help but think of the children and their families and the trauma they endured and how the parents are going to explain what happened to their preschool aged children." And this wasn't an isolated incident. Self-described Christians gathered to pray outside a NYC library as a drag queen named Flame sang the ABCs with kids, led them in coloring activities, and read books to them about how it’s OK to be different. And in Chicago, protesters gathered to harass parents who brought their children to the story time event while denouncing the library staff as “from the devil.”
At the same time, openly gay CA State Senator Scott Wiener, who’d gotten numerous death threats, received an email, unnerving in its specificity, claiming that bombs had been placed in his office and at his home. Sen. Wiener, who, in 2017, negotiated with robbers to pay them $200 in exchange for his phone (they all walked to the ATM together) was both undeterred and unsurprised. He described how "words have consequences," linking these actions to the rhetoric being espoused by so many politicians and ministers. "What was supposed to be a joyful, celebratory moment, became yet another reminder that we are under attack," Honey continued, speaking of Pride:
That is why in San Francisco it is so important that we continue to give them hope. Every year we give them a 200 foot pink triangle visible from 20 miles away. We give them a Pride flag on every corner of the city. We give them Trans March. We give them Dyke March. We give them a Pride parade and celebration where thousands fill the streets. We give them a Transgender District, and a Leather LGBTQ District, and a Castro District known the world over. This year, this June, this Pride month, let us make it clear that we renounce all hate. Let’s promise each other that we will strive to bring people together. And let’s ensure that we build a future where all of us are seen, heard, and respected for who we are.
Someone else, speaking to the incidents, commented, "Every year, some of us ask why we still need Pride. This is why." Together, these incidents are just one example of how the dreams that birthed us are now under vigorous assault. The same people decrying Story Hours are also comfortable derisively referring to trans people as “it”; assaulting anyone representing gender diversity, and demeaning those who don’t fit the narrative. Others resort to bullying; everything from intimidation to shaming. And still others weaponize religion to propagate inhumanity.
But none of the above is new. These virtues have been under attack essentially since our beginning; framed as everything from the “Tide of the Turbans” to “Communists are recruiting our kids.” This kind of social hysteria, however, was always doomed to fail. In fact, it only works as long as our group’s power is so absolute that even defectors can’t break our hold on society. But that’s clearly no longer who we are, and is indicative of the deep problems we’re facing, and of the trouble we’re now seeing.
We Americans have, since our beginning, been of two minds. We’ve championed both change and rigidity. We’ve exhibited both kindness and cruelty, have been both caring and calloused, both wise and given to folly. We exist both as this cacophonous mix of ancestries and cultures, heritages and traditions, and as a singular nation. We possess unfathomable depths of compassion rooted in spiritual consciousness, and likewise, we’ve allowed the faith systems that should be its conduit into the world to be perverted; becoming some of compassion’s greatest violators.
In so many ways, we made real those dreams that birthed us. But in other ways, we’d not only abandon those dreams, we’d begun to let ourselves forget that we’d ever even held them. They say the American Revolution began with the shot heard round the world. But American society’s shift from the Age of Promise to the Age of Opportunism hardly made a sound.
I can still remember it. I was sitting in my middle school American History class and came across a photo of a painting; the same one referenced earlier, JE Taylor's pictorial representation of the Battle of Bunker Hill; the one with Peter Salem firing his rifle at British Royal Marine officer Major Pitcairn. I remember staring at it, the first visual image I’d ever seen that included anyone other than people of obvious English ancestry in the events of our founding. But what shocked me just as much was realizing that I held an assumption; one that I’d never thought to question.
Somewhere along the way, I’d unconsciously embraced a devastating and disempowering false narrative; that brown-skinned people played no part in the Revolution; that we simply weren’t there. All my life, I’d had this feeling I couldn’t name, and that I didn’t know even had a name. The feeling I’d been struggling with was displacement, and that picture was, for me, the beginning of addressing it, of writing diversity back into history.
This process of re-finding my place in this story would prove to be multifaceted and ongoing. It’s what I experienced in college when I took the Myers Briggs Type Inventory, and discovered that I’m an INFP – introvert, intuitive, feeling, and perceiving. It didn’t matter to me that in a society that values extroversion (outward focus), sensing (concreteness), thinking (facts) and judging (deciding quickly), that all four of my traits were “unpreferred” – especially for males – nor that only about 1% of the population shared my personality profile.
I’d long known I was an outlier. But what the inventory gave me was a sense of belonging; even if INFPs were as few as they claimed, I was a type. There was a place for me. I had a similar experience regarding handedness. Back in 2nd grade, I had a teacher who told me, the only left-hander in the class, that she didn’t know how to teach “someone like me” how to write. So, when adult me stumbled upon a whimsical novelty store at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, I was surprised that things like left-handed scissors made me feel affirmed and validated in a way that, until that moment, I didn’t know I needed. As a result, to this day, I take the time to acknowledge fellow lefties; appreciating that our minds work differently.
Then, there was the discovery of Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell’s picture book, LOVING, which impacted me as much as the painting with Peter Salem; an equally powerful affirmation; especially as someone who identifies as LGBTQ. Of course, it makes sense that they were there, doing their part to build our nation. We’re a society that acts as if gay people didn’t exist before Stonewall, and that if they did, they made no real contributions. But nothing could be less true.
That was especially evident in the photo of two Negro servicemen in uniform, one resting his chin on the shoulder of the other. It challenged so many of our stereotypes, about gay African American men, about gay men in the military, and about gay men forming couple relationships long before coming out was a thing. Something about seeing them also made me feel seen. And that’s why heritage months and talking about our diverse history is so important.
It’s what makes Iowa schoolteacher Jane Elliott’s choice, on April 4, 1968, to help her students understand the prejudice that had led to Martin’s murder earlier that same evening; to not just talk about it, but help them feel it, so profound. “It’s a fact,” she told them after explaining the exercise and getting into character, “Blue-eyed people are better than brown-eyed people.” And that was really all it took. “I watched what had been marvelous, cooperative, wonderful, thoughtful children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating little third graders in a space of 15 minutes.”
In A Class Divided, the students, now adults, came together for a reunion. And each of them talked about how that one lesson changed their lives for the better, and that as tough as it was to go through, how grateful they were to walk, if only for an hour, in the shoes of the unpreferred. Something unimaginably powerful happens when we acknowledge the place of others; we find ourselves also affirmed and acknowledged.
The exact same day that Jane was leading her children in the exercise, the Supremes were in New York City performing a heart-rending version of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s Somewhere (There’s a Place for Us), live on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, also in Martin’s honor. The timeless lyrics of the song, written a decade earlier for West Side Story, paired with Diana’s reverent delivery, could not have been more moving. It evoked images of that same Promised Land Martin had spoken of just two nights prior in his sermon, when he shared of having been to the mountaintop. “There’s a place for us,” Diana sang. .
Somewhere a place for us. Peace and quiet and open air, wait for us, somewhere. There's a time for us, someday a time for us. Time together with time to spare, time to learn, time to care; someday, somewhere. We'll find a new way of living; we'll find a way of forgiving, somewhere… There's a place for us, a time and place for us. Hold my hand and we're halfway there; hold my hand and I'll take you there – somehow, some day, somewhere.
“Yes, there's a place for each of us,” she said during the song’s interlude, with the other Supremes humming in the background. “And we must try to pursue this place, where love is like a passion that burns like a fire. Let our efforts be as determined as those of Dr. Martin Luther King, who had a dream that all God's children, black men, white men, Jews, Gentiles, Protestants, and Catholics, could join hands and sing that spiritual old hymn: ‘Free at last, great God, free at last.’”
In that moment, this overwhelmingly white-identifying audience, many, for the first time, began to learn what Jane Elliott’s third-grade class was also learning; how Martin’s death the night before was not just a loss for African Americans but for all Americans, how we’re all caught up together in this inescapable network of mutuality, and how this long-dreamt-of place is a place not just for some of us, but for all of us. When the Supremes finished, the deafening applause was instant, as was the standing ovation.
DEMOCRACY - Sustainable Societies Key Ingredient #2
O, let America be America again, the land that never has been yet, and yet must be – The land where every man is free. I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars. I am the red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek – and finding only the same old stupid plan, of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak. The land that's mine – the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME – who made America, whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, must bring back our mighty dream again. O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, and yet I swear this oath – America will be! – Langston Hughes – Let America be America Again
The core premise of the Enlightenment, that society should be structured based on reason rather than doctrine and that societal order should be rooted in civil, rather than religious law, forever changed us; both how we thought of ourselves and ordered our societies. The ideas underpinning democracy, a previously unimaginable socio-evolutionary leap forward, spread around the world, upending tiered social systems that had existed throughout human history almost instantly. All of a sudden, humankind was dreaming of what could be, instead of settling for what had always been.
Then, there’s the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment’s predecessor, which changed us in equally significant ways, upending humankind’s most foundational paradigm – the belief that the Earth was the center of the universe, and we, its masters. Instead, we’d come to realize that the Earth is a planet, a rather small one that, contrary to everything our senses tell us, is in constant motion, both rotating on its axis and revolving around the sun. In one fell swoop, the Earth (and by extension, humankind) had fallen from the crown of creation to a rather insignificant blip caught up in the wake of our smallish star, floating somewhere out on the edge of one of 200 billion galaxies. But as humbling as this stunning realization was, it was also quite liberating; the same knowledge that rendered all of us insignificant also made us, greatest to smallest, equals.
These shifts led to other shifts. Take divine rights, of kings and the Church, to rule. Not only was it universally accepted; we’d never even thought to question it. That is, until the introduction of a paradigm-shattering idea; that rulers rule only by the consent of (and therefore, are accountable to) the governed. This single thought shifted the power from rulers to the people. The American Revolution, thanks to people like Franklin and Jefferson, was deeply influenced by this thinking; evident in both how issues were framed and how governance was structured, and by Madison, who drew heavily from the Enlightenment in writing the Constitution.
Similarly, the Pilgrims, upon arriving safely off the coast of modern Provincetown, MA, drafted and signed their very own shared commitment to “equal and just laws”. That document, the Mayflower Compact, is generally believed to be the beginning of democracy in the “New World”. But for the idea of democracy itself, we’d borrow from the source; the Athenians, who, around the sixth century BC, invented what’s often described as the first such governance system in the world.
It’s from them that we even got the word dēmokratia, which, derived from demos (“the people”), and kratos (“rule”), meant, “the people rule”, “rule of the people” or put another way, “self-rule”. One way of grasping democracy is envisioning a nation where the people themselves are the rule-makers, rule-keepers, and rule enforcers; or, as described by President Lincoln, “government of the people, by the people, for the people”. Of course, like with most things, we’d take the concept and make it our own, both embracing new ideas (segregation of powers, universal civil liberties and religious freedom, equal voting rights, people-chosen leadership, just courts, and accountable governance) and following real-world examples like the Iroquois League; a form of governance where power was shared between a federal body and respective states.
Democracy is the foundation of a society with staying power. The concept of self-rule disperses the role of governance to all and is the means by which a more perfect union is formed. The system, when truly practiced, creates societal stability in two key ways. First, it counteracts nepotism in positions of power, and second, it keeps us honest; everyone gets a vote and a voice, and every citizen who desires to do so, can run for office. Or, at least that’s how it should work.
As a concept, democracy might be the greatest social invention of humankind since we started forming primitive societies. It is also arguably the most advanced, so much so that today, true democracy still remains more aspirational than actualized; partly because a system where governance is shared by all is a system where unequal power is held by none, including by those who have grown accustomed to rolls of the dice falling perpetually in their favor.
Theoretically, we get that systems dedicated to collective thriving are fundamentally incompatible with ones that advantage only some. But practically, we find ourselves drawn to both; praying for the former while pursuing the latter. Which is exactly how we end up here, trying to look like a democracy without actually being one. But this path was chosen long before we got to things like policy. Our course was set the moment we rendered verdict on equality, and whether we really believed in it.
Equality
Don't you know, they're talkin' 'bout a revolution? It sounds like a whisper. Cause, finally, the tables are starting to turn, talkin’ bout a revolution, oh, talkin’ bout a revolution. – Tracy Chapman, Talkin’ Bout a Revolution
“And we hold these truths to be self-evident…” These profound concepts articulated in the Declaration describe potent principles that undergird much of the world’s civic structure. That all are created equal, “Are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”, and that these rights include “Life, Liberty and pursuit of Happiness.” Intended as an unambiguous avowal that this would not only be a new nation but a new kind of nation, this singular statement, a renunciation of the Old World tradition of structuring people, from birth, into classes was a radical departure from any way in which civilizations had viewed themselves prior to this era.
America has British philosopher Thomas Hobbs to thank for many of these revolutionary concepts. In his seminal work, Leviathan, written in 1651, before any of the American Founders were born, Hobbs asserted the radical notion that society exists, not because of the will of kings or deities, but because of an agreement that we’ve all entered into; implicitly or explicitly. This radical idea, referred to today as Social Contract Theory, made each member of society an empowered participant, and served as the foundation for much of modern political philosophy and, especially, western political theory.
The assertion that people are fundamentally equal might be the slipperiest of these core ideas, and the one most easy to get wrong. For those of us in the group that has more, the temptation is to use our abundance as retroactive justification: The fact that we have more must mean that we’re worth more. Or, “If we have it, we must deserve to have it.” Then, the rest of society chimes in like Motown backup singers. Magazines like Fortune and Forbes describe the wealth in billionaires’ possession as what they’re “worth”. But that’s not really what they’re worth. That’s what they have – whether they actually deserve to have it or not.
In reality, any society structured to enrich a segment of us by impoverishing the rest of us is not only inherently unequal but is already failing. Historian Arnold J. Toynbee, in 1961, theorized that all societies pass through distinct stages, including genesis, growth, time of troubles, universal state, and disintegration. He argued that civilizations tend to fall, not because of environmental factors or attacks from the outside, but because they become incapable of solving new problems.
According to his theory, the very people we once thought of as superior – whether in intellect, creativity, wealth or some other quality – in an effort to maintain dominance, end up forming the very barriers that prevent society from adapting, and thus, surviving. Essentially, they commit suicide. The ultimate sign, according to Toynbee, that a civilization has lost all coherence is when it enters Stage Four, where the dominant group forms what he calls a “universal state”: the attempt to hold, by force and “against all right and reason – a position of inherited privilege which it has ceased to merit.” Anyone looking can see how this applies to where we are today; how we’re unwittingly engineering society’s fall by corroding the very structures that sustain it.
In our tendency to discount the inherent inestimable value that each person brings, we reduce the idea of equality to mere leveling effect, the process of distribution where we even out the highs and lows so that everyone gets the same amount. But that’s setting the bar too low. The line where equality resides is not the average: It’s somewhere beyond the fifth standard deviation. What makes us equal is not a regression to the mean. It’s the priceless, often untapped potential inherent in every person. It’s the recognition that we’re all invaluable, and all, as one of my minister friends put it, “fractional reflections of God”. An enduring belief in equality enables us to create a society where anyone and everyone can achieve their potential, which, in turn, is how societies survive.
Put more practically, the degree to which a collective believes in equality can be seen in its lived experience; the degree to which all are validated and fairness is universal. This is what we mean by an equitable society; one that recognizes everyone’s inestimable worth, and that therefore enables them to live into their diversity, make their special contribution, and to thrive. Equality, by its very nature, counteracts preferentialism, discrimination and bias, and, at the same time, engenders confidence in society itself. Without it, we lose our sense of collective “we”; the ideals that hold us together and make us real start to fray, before eventually deteriorating altogether.
A “free-born” democracy like America had an advantage. It didn’t have to migrate to a platform of inherent equality; that’s where we started. But it might also be a disadvantage. We’ve never had to go through the hard work of becoming something else. The question before us is whether we, a society that’s allowed its commitment to equality to falter, can find our own way back.
HUMANITY - Sustainable Societies Key Ingredient #3
One evening, a Cherokee elder told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, "My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all. One is hatred, envy, jealousy, greed, arrogance, resentment and hard-heartedness. The other is love, kindness, goodness, compassion, faith, hope and honor." The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: "Which wolf wins?" His grandfather simply replied, "The one you feed." – Indigenous American Proverb
I look behind my ears for the green, even my sweat smells clean, glare off the white hurts my eyes. Gotta get out of bed, get a hammer and a nail; learn how to use my hands, not just my head; I think myself into jail. Now I know a refuge never grows, from a chin in a hand in a thoughtful pose; gotta tend the earth if you want a rose. – Indigo Girls, Hammer And A Nail
If there’s one thread that weaves unbroken throughout this entire book, it is that of humanity and its prevailing necessity. Humanity can be described as our ability to think, feel, act and react in ways that are consistent with humankind at its best. It’s about conducting ourselves in such a way that both we and others are better off afterward than before. We all harbor dual impulses, the ability to behave humanely and inhumanely. As such, much of life is about deciding which impulses we will embrace.
Consistently living a life marked by humanity might very well be the greatest challenge we can undertake. Doing so requires that we consistently turn away from primitive instincts that come so naturally to us, and to instead choose to strengthen those capabilities that make us more than we’ve been. Humanity is the catalyst of society. It provides us with the ability to outgrow our own self-destructive tendencies and upgrade the behaviors we consider normal. It breathes life into communities and makes them places where that life can thrive.
Later, we’ll explore the Four Actions and how they strengthen both our level of humanity and the consistency with which it is manifested. For now, the goal is to simply provide a bit more color regarding how advancing humanity changes us. Any of us, if we take the time, can recall any number of ways in which another’s humanity has helped us become who we are today. Some of those things were monumental; the saving of a life, helping someone survive a tragedy, or the loved ones who made huge sacrifices on our behalf.
But humanity shines through just as powerfully through small things; especially when done by a stranger. It’s the African American man who sheltered a Euro American girl with his umbrella, a co-ed lugging a huge suitcase, and who stood there weeping after having been ignored by the hotshot Wall Street exec she’d begged not to poach her cab. He then stood out in the rain and flagged her down another one.
It’s the woman who dutifully acknowledges people suffering from homelessness as human beings, or the person who allowed a woman and her 6-year-old daughter to pack a basket with $40 worth of groceries, then, paid for them, and let the little girl pick out the candy bar of her choice. It’s the person who pays the bridge toll of the driver behind them, or the woman who bought clothes for a little boy working outside a Birmingham grocery store.
Humanity improves how we perceive things; how we look at the world, others and ourselves. It’s the expanding of our consciousness to grasp that which is not immediately obvious; seeing the worth in others that others might overlook; and anticipating the ripple effects of our actions and the things we set in motion. Humanity engages our hearts. It’s both feeling with and caring for others; seeing ourselves in them and them in us. It’s seeking to understand why they’ve made the choices they’ve made, and how, in similar situations, we’d likely make similar choices.
It means extending forgiveness (both to them and to ourselves) and bravely advocating on behalf of those who need it. Humanity fosters beauty. It inspires us to make art and make music, to imagine and aspire. It’s the source of our ability to give comfort and find joy, and to appreciate them wherever we see them. Like the color purple that Shug, in Alice Walker’s book of the same name, encouraged us to not overlook. It’s through humanity that we reify those things we otherwise only dream of. It enables us to inject both wonder into our lives and meaning into our existence.
Humanity renews our souls. It validates our worth and gives voice to that inner part of us where we are most alive, inspiring us to become that better version of ourselves and to lead our best lives. It is this strengthening of our spiritual core that allows us to outgrow hubris and self-inflation, to awaken our conscience and to live in peace; both with others and ourselves. It’s what my friend Nick exhibited at every turn. While we understand its value in theory, making it real requires, as the Indigo Girls reminded us, getting our hands in the dirt, and allowing it to manifest in our day-to-day lives. Which, as a people, means holding one another close and our sense of unity high.
Unity
“Unity to be real must stand the severest strain without breaking.” Mahatma Gandhi
“Won't it be wonderful when black history and Native American history and Jewish history and all of U.S. history is taught from one book. Just U.S. history.” Maya Angelou
It was great Roman philosopher Cicero in De Officiis, who stated, “When each person loves the other as much as himself, it makes one out of the many (unas fiat ex pluribus). This reference (or at least this era) is thought to be the point of origin for E pluribus unum – the motto adopted as the Great Seal by America’s first Congress in 1776, and which means, “out of many, one”.
Both many and one. (It’s also worth noting that it’s not sameness – whether of opinion or ancestry, religion or politics – that makes one out of the many. It’s love. According to Cicero, that’s the great unifier.) The adoption of this idea was as critical to our survival as was farming: it united us, while allowing us to maintain our individuality; our diversity. The people of this new land could build a united nation while remaining separate states, craft a common spiritual ethos while practicing different faiths, and create a singular culture while expressing many ethnicities.
This is how a common identity was forged; moving from being thirteen colonies to being one nation. With this notion came other important concepts like solidarity (we are all in this together), allegiance (all Americans, regardless of how they differ, are my kin), fidelity (a willingness to make sacrifices for one’s country) and commitment to the commonwealth, or common well-being.
From culture to religion, non-religion, ancestry, ethnicity, languages etc., we Americans had more differences than similarities. We therefore needed something other than prescribed “sameness” to tie us together. What emerged was a commitment to the dream of what America could become; what it could mean for humankind. It was a pledge, not just to the America that was, but to the America that could be, and to be, as Cicero said, a land where “each person loves the other as much as himself”.
While diverse societies have, by far, better chances of adapting and sustaining, they also tend to be more vulnerable at the onset, and when approaching major demographic shifts (like the one we’re facing now). This is because of two reasons: The first is the challenge of the many; the lack of a dominant culture makes maintaining common ground, oneness, far more difficult. The second is a shortcoming of human nature; our lessening regard for those beyond our personal circle; in other words, we find it harder to care about strangers than people we know.
That’s why we’re less affected by millions of people dying in a far-off land, but profoundly impacted by a few thousand deaths in our own country or even a single death in our neighborhood. But it’s more fundamental than that. For example, in a 1969 study, psychologist Philip Zimbardo took two groups of female students at NYU, giving one group name tags, and the other group anonymized numbers and hoods.
He then asked individuals from both groups to administer shocks to other students. He found that participants were willing to deliver shocks to others that were twice as high when they did so behind hoods, as when their faces were uncovered and their identities known (which also explains the hoods worn by groups like the KKK). Us caring less isn’t just about us not knowing them; it’s also when they don’t know who we are.
His findings are indicative of a state psychologists call “deindividuation"; a condition characterized by a lessening of human regard, paired with a diminished sense of personal accountability. While this can happen in all manner of contexts, anonymity, whether real or perceived, is always a key ingredient. Dr. Zimbardo further suggests that “diffused responsibility, group activity, altered temporal perspective, emotional arousal, and sensory overload” are all input variables that can trigger “deindividuated” reactions.
Societies full of disconnected strangers are ideal environments for deindividuation; something we often experience whenever we get behind the wheel. In a Wired magazine article titled, Big Question: Why Am I a Horrible Person When I Drive? journalist Bryan Gardiner begins: Here's a scenario that should be familiar: You're driving along on the highway. Suddenly, without signaling, a massive SUV comes barreling into your lane from the right, forcing you to jam on the brakes and swerve out of the way to avoid a collision. “Worthless piece of %$#@,” you yell to this person you don't know (and who can't hear you) before embarking on a quest to teach them a lesson by tailgating them for the next two miles…
And while the scenario that Bryan presented is one that most of us can relate to, and one that rarely leads to tragedy, deindividuation can also have far deeper, far more dangerous ramifications, and is a key driver of our nationwide problems with so many minority deaths at the hands of police officers. Amidst calls for things like redirecting some of the policing budget to social services, we also can’t overlook the powerful role that deindividuation, when officers and the other members of the community are strangers, plays.
Both police officers and other community members are subject to responding in ways that they would not if they knew each other, if their siblings played sports together, if they’d been in the same 3rd grade class, if their mothers worked together, if they picked their kids up from the same school, if they shopped at the same grocery stores or frequented the same farmers’ market, or even if they simply knew each other’s names. This familiarity and participation in the community off the job, paired with training and standards on the job, has been shown to dramatically reduce violent incidents, and results are even more dramatic for departments that shift their approach from a focus on process (law enforcement) to one of outcomes (peaceful, cohesive, vital communities).
Whether how we drive, how we police or how we respond to tragedies elsewhere in the world, it turns out that learning to see one another as people, as fellow members of a singular, commonly affected community of which we are also a part, might turn out to be the most important thing we can do to combat deindividuation, and instead, move beyond being a land of strangers to that of a united people.
Life on the Ground – Mary’s Table
In the preface, I shared a bit about Mary, the grandmother who raised me, and how it was my effort to learn to see America as she did, both its beauty and its flaws, that led to this book. Another Mary from Birmingham, she was born fifty years after Mary Anderson, and in a place that would, simply because of her ancestry, deny her so much of what the other Mary was afforded.
For instance, had Mary Anderson been on a bus in Birmingham instead of a trolley in NY, she’d still have been seated close enough to see the driver, and thus come up with her windshield wiper invention. Whereas my Mary would’ve been somewhere back behind the color bar. And that’s just one small window into life in her world. I describe in Me and Mary how she grew up “female and colored, poor and Southern, the daughter of sharecroppers and orphaned,” how she came of age in a time dominated by the likes of the Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind; and that’s before accounting for the devastating impact of the Great Depression.
Yet, despite these burdens of unimaginable weight, in a million small ways, she’d make the lives of everyone around her better, and ensure that our home was a wonderfully warm and happy one. In her and my grandfather’s house, like most Southern families, Sunday dinner was the big meal of the week. It was the only time that most everyone was home, instead of out working, or otherwise coming and going. Mary taught all her children to cook and half of them cooked professionally. Robert, her and my grandfather’s oldest son, was the head chef at Parliament House, Birmingham’s preeminent hotel, and Naomi, her oldest daughter, was one of the city’s most sought-after wedding cake makers.
If you were a Belle who wanted her cake to be so spectacular that it ended up being mentioned in the society pages, Naomi was who you commissioned. But Sunday dinner was Mary’s affair, though everyone pitched in; spending time together as we did. During the week, she made dinner for the family she worked for, then, came home and did the same for us, so those meals were simple; liver on Mondays, spaghetti on Wednesdays, fish on Fridays.
Sundays, however, were another thing altogether. The table was piled high with dishes, each more amazing than the others. There were heaping greens and pot liquor, hot cornbread, her to-die-for buttermilk biscuits and homemade jam, fried chicken and glazed ham, corn on the cob, oven cooked root vegetables, string beans seasoned with onions, black-eyed peas and neck bones, fried green tomatoes and okra, and always two desserts – homemade cake or fresh fruit cobbler, banana pudding or sweet potato pie. Much of this came either from her garden or the gardens of friends; trades of her abundance of tomatoes and peaches for corn and beans.
Looking back, I’m astounded by how many people Mary could feed with so little money. But that was common for folk of her era. Southern food has come of age as of late, but back then, like most innovations, it was born of necessity. I remember being completely surprised when, a few years ago, I saw actual collard greens for sale in the Whole Foods produce section. Though today, touted for their nutritional value, ten years ago, hardly anyone outside the South had even heard of them. But in my childhood, it wasn’t Sunday dinner without collards and cornbread.
Originating near Greece, collards were long an African delicacy, then became part of regional American cuisine at Jamestown. And like the people who brought them here, they can survive and thrive in the most difficult of conditions. That’s likely how they became such a staple so quickly. Then, there’s cornbread. It was Native Americans who taught the rest of us how to grind corn into meal for baking, as well as how to infuse it with an alkali to make hominy, which, in turn, became grits, the porridge that pretty much every Southerner has for breakfast. Over the years, I’d think about the many influences that made that one meal possible; the traditions and heritages, advances and innovations; the tapestry of American culture on display every Sunday afternoon.
My grandmother had two rules; all are welcome and everyone eats their fill. As such, I’m not sure that a table exists that could’ve seated our sprawling assemblage of family, both born and found. So instead, we all crowded into the kitchen for grace, then filled our plates, and sat in groupings spanning from the front porch to the back yard. My grandfather Olden would tune all the radios to the same station so that everyone was listening to the same thing wherever we were, and people would flow, like water, from one conversation to another.
One of the highlights of my grandmother’s life was seeing an African American win the Democratic nomination. (It’s easy for us to forget what an unprecedented moment that was. But just ten years prior, Morgan Freeman had played the president in the disaster film Deep Impact, and even that made news across the nation. So seeing this happen for real seemed almost unimaginable.) I remember, early on in the campaign, making my monthly call on Sunday afternoon, as had long been my habit, which gave me the chance to catch up with almost everyone. It really was the next best thing to being there.
At the time, I was organizing minority ministers and speaking at historically white churches around the country, just as I’d done for Richard Arrington 30 years prior. I could tell by her voice that my grandmother’s health was failing, and I wanted to come home, but she wouldn’t have it. “This is God’s plan for you,” she said, “The work he has for you to do.” She ended that call the same way she always did; “I’m so proud of you.”
In Barack Obama’s Democratic nomination acceptance speech, she’d get to witness what was for her a miracle, including his description of the promise of America as “the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise and fall as one nation, the fundamental belief that I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper.” Mary, like Madelyn, the grandmother who raised Barack, would pass away before the historic election, but so much of her lives on in so many ways. And not a Sunday goes by when I don’t think of her, and how she turned something as simple as a meal into an anchor point for family. I recall the laughter and love, and how she was feeding so much more than our bodies.
I think of those lyrics from Jimmy Webb’s If These Walls Could Speak: They would tell you that I owe you, more than I can ever pay. Here’s someone who really loves you; don’t ever go away – that’s what these walls would say. And instantly, I’m transported back to those old walls in a working-class home in central Birmingham. I’m reminded both of all that I’ve been given and of what, together, we should be striving for; to be a place where all are welcome and everyone eats their fill. Because in the end, these are the things that hold us together, and are the only ones that truly matter.
And Yes, We’ve Just Begun
And when the evening comes, we smile; so much of life ahead. We'll find a place where there's room to grow, and yes, we've just begun. – The Carpenters
Don't let anyone make you disappear, Charlie. – Mr. Ajayi, a gay teacher, to young Charlie Spring, gay protagonist in Netflix's Heartstopper series.
Honey Mahogany, Chair of the SF Democratic Party, in a June 2022 email, described how a contingent of men identifying themselves as members of the Proud Boys disrupted the San Lorenzo library’s Drag Queen Story Hour. "As a Drag Queen Story Hour Queen," she explained, "I am very aware that this could have happened to any one of us. We all received the email asking if we were interested in reading at San Leandro. I keep thinking about how terrified she [Panda Dulce] must have been given what had just happened a few weeks prior at Uvalde” (the shooting tragedy where 17 kids and 2 teachers were killed).
Honey continued, “I also can’t help but think of the children and their families and the trauma they endured and how the parents are going to explain what happened to their preschool aged children." And this wasn't an isolated incident. Self-described Christians gathered to pray outside a NYC library as a drag queen named Flame sang the ABCs with kids, led them in coloring activities, and read books to them about how it’s OK to be different. And in Chicago, protesters gathered to harass parents who brought their children to the story time event while denouncing the library staff as “from the devil.”
At the same time, openly gay CA State Senator Scott Wiener, who’d gotten numerous death threats, received an email, unnerving in its specificity, claiming that bombs had been placed in his office and at his home. Sen. Wiener, who, in 2017, negotiated with robbers to pay them $200 in exchange for his phone (they all walked to the ATM together) was both undeterred and unsurprised. He described how "words have consequences," linking these actions to the rhetoric being espoused by so many politicians and ministers. "What was supposed to be a joyful, celebratory moment, became yet another reminder that we are under attack," Honey continued, speaking of Pride:
That is why in San Francisco it is so important that we continue to give them hope. Every year we give them a 200 foot pink triangle visible from 20 miles away. We give them a Pride flag on every corner of the city. We give them Trans March. We give them Dyke March. We give them a Pride parade and celebration where thousands fill the streets. We give them a Transgender District, and a Leather LGBTQ District, and a Castro District known the world over. This year, this June, this Pride month, let us make it clear that we renounce all hate. Let’s promise each other that we will strive to bring people together. And let’s ensure that we build a future where all of us are seen, heard, and respected for who we are.
Someone else, speaking to the incidents, commented, "Every year, some of us ask why we still need Pride. This is why." Together, these incidents are just one example of how the dreams that birthed us are now under vigorous assault. The same people decrying Story Hours are also comfortable derisively referring to trans people as “it”; assaulting anyone representing gender diversity, and demeaning those who don’t fit the narrative. Others resort to bullying; everything from intimidation to shaming. And still others weaponize religion to propagate inhumanity.
But none of the above is new. These virtues have been under attack essentially since our beginning; framed as everything from the “Tide of the Turbans” to “Communists are recruiting our kids.” This kind of social hysteria, however, was always doomed to fail. In fact, it only works as long as our group’s power is so absolute that even defectors can’t break our hold on society. But that’s clearly no longer who we are, and is indicative of the deep problems we’re facing, and of the trouble we’re now seeing.
We Americans have, since our beginning, been of two minds. We’ve championed both change and rigidity. We’ve exhibited both kindness and cruelty, have been both caring and calloused, both wise and given to folly. We exist both as this cacophonous mix of ancestries and cultures, heritages and traditions, and as a singular nation. We possess unfathomable depths of compassion rooted in spiritual consciousness, and likewise, we’ve allowed the faith systems that should be its conduit into the world to be perverted; becoming some of compassion’s greatest violators.
In so many ways, we made real those dreams that birthed us. But in other ways, we’d not only abandon those dreams, we’d begun to let ourselves forget that we’d ever even held them. They say the American Revolution began with the shot heard round the world. But American society’s shift from the Age of Promise to the Age of Opportunism hardly made a sound.
Segments from Other Chapters
"The Goodbye Girl", a first-hand telling of a young Rodney's adventure to downtown Birmingham to see his first on-screen film, is also a glimpse into the thriving city that Birmingham was in the 1970s, the subsequent damage redlining did to it, and what the legacy of segregation looked like. But more than anything, it's a story of transformation, and how the people of that great city turned their diversity, something long thought of as a liability, into its greatest asset. Read about it here.
Better than We Found It describes the important life lesson that Mary taught him, and how that lesson has served as an ordering principle for his life. Read about it here.
Sister Rose (Or, the Power of "We") tells the story of how Sister Rose, a middle-aged, Anglo Birminghamian, stepped up to help a 13-year-old Rodney campaign for mayoral candidate Richard Arrington, who, just 15 years after the Birmingham Campaign, would make history as the city's first African American mayor. Read about it here.
I'm Going Up Yonder is about how the Great Sociological Shift that's been building under the surface for almost a century has made landfall, and how, as we adjust to this new reality, we're each responsible for the impact our actions have on the rest of us, whether they bring us together or break us apart. Read about it here.
The Sum of Our Parts is about the dynamics that led to the 2020 protests, a long-deferred reckoning stemming back to the American Civil War, the creation of our nation's race construct, and the damage it's done to us. The story features the song, We Americans, by the Avett Brothers, and uses it as a springboard for making sense of our shared history -- the good and the evil, steps forward and back, and the fate each of us is choosing for all of us. Read about it here.
Better than We Found It describes the important life lesson that Mary taught him, and how that lesson has served as an ordering principle for his life. Read about it here.
Sister Rose (Or, the Power of "We") tells the story of how Sister Rose, a middle-aged, Anglo Birminghamian, stepped up to help a 13-year-old Rodney campaign for mayoral candidate Richard Arrington, who, just 15 years after the Birmingham Campaign, would make history as the city's first African American mayor. Read about it here.
I'm Going Up Yonder is about how the Great Sociological Shift that's been building under the surface for almost a century has made landfall, and how, as we adjust to this new reality, we're each responsible for the impact our actions have on the rest of us, whether they bring us together or break us apart. Read about it here.
The Sum of Our Parts is about the dynamics that led to the 2020 protests, a long-deferred reckoning stemming back to the American Civil War, the creation of our nation's race construct, and the damage it's done to us. The story features the song, We Americans, by the Avett Brothers, and uses it as a springboard for making sense of our shared history -- the good and the evil, steps forward and back, and the fate each of us is choosing for all of us. Read about it here.