Race, Prejudice, and Survival
When an emergency situation arises, the chances are that some of the people around you at the time will be different from you.
Even if they have the same ethnic background, they may have a completely different moral compass, a completely different world view. Since you are reading this, you probably see helping people as a duty and a privilege. Some people that you would normally be very comfortable around may think that stopping to give aid is just stupid and wouldn’t consider it.
You might actually have more in common with someone of a different ethnicity. Or, put more bluntly, color.
This gets very personal, but I do not know any better way of making these points. It’s also long, so if you’re going to take this journey with me, sit back and relax.
I have had an interesting walk through prejudice. I’m Irish white of skin. But I was raised in a household where the color of a person’s skin didn’t mean they were any worse… or any better… than any other person we had over for dinner. However, the town we lived in was deeply segregated. South of a certain street, no white person ever lived in any of the houses. North of that street, a ‘person of color’ could not buy a house nor rent a room. One of the K-6 schools, and one middle school, were for black people only. (’Black’ was the polite racial word among our black friends at the time, and still is among the black friends I have who are of my age. If you prefer other, just let me know and that’s what I’ll say when I’m talking with you.) The rest of the schools were white, with a couple of students with parents from Japan, and a couple who had come from Mexico to live in the United States.
Then in high school, we were all thrown together. I learned many lessons about race, prejudice, and survival at that tense high school.
Flash forward a few years, and you would have found me living in Oakland, California. In those days, there was white Oakland, and there was black Oakland. They did not mix much. But we got a good deal on the rent for a house that was on a rare ‘mixed’ street near the border with Berkeley, which meant 80-plus percent black. I was fine with that. I even really liked it. Because I was a little tired of white culture and the war it had spawned. I thought black culture would be a nice change.
Naturally enough, I experienced severe prejudice from many of the people in the neighborhood. But I also experienced close friendship with my next-door neighbors, who were as black as I was white. After knowing them for a couple of years, we went to a bar in Oakland where no other white person had ever gone before. I can say that with absolute confidence, because the owner was the father of the friend we went with. When we walked in, there was sudden, total, electrifying silence. Then Lamont shouted, a little too loudly in the hush, “It’s okay, they’re with me!” And the conversations started again.
Before my days in Oakland were over, I had decided that I hated culture. All culture. White culture, black culture, Irish culture, every culture. Because at the base of it, culture keeps us separated from God and other people by the exact degree that we love it. Many of my friends disagree. But I’m sure of it.
Flash to England a decade ago. I cannot get into a certain gym in London. Why? The guy at the desk won’t say. I have a suspicion, and ask my wife, who is apparently of Nordic descent with her long, light-blond hair, to go to the same gym. No problem. They guy smiles and says come on in. I try again right after her. I’m flatly refused entrance.
It becomes clear that it’s because I look really, really Irish. The funny thing is, my wife is actually more Irish than I.
One night, after a play and late dinner in the London theater district, I try to hail a cab to get us back to our hotel. Nope. No cab even slows down. It gets very late, and decide to go via the London Underground. But we find that the local station is closed for the night. We end up having to walk back on streets with discarded drug needles on the sidewalk.
As long as we are in London, the only way I can get a cab is to have the Pakistani doorman at our hotel in Bloomsbury call one for us.
Problems of prejudice reside not only in race and ethnicity, but other, less obvious realms.
I look stupid. It’s simply true. I remember when I was a kid, a woman saying to my mother, when the woman didn’t think I was listening, “He’s not too bright, is he?” She didn’t have anything to base that on except the way I looked.
Even now, I look like, well, muscle for some nefarious organization. Brawn, not brains. I’ve been places where people ask me if I’m the bouncer.
But I was a National Merit scholar. I have a degree from the University of California at Berkeley with honors. A hobby of mine is theoretical physics. I’ve had fiction published by Ballentine Books in this country, and in Australia, and technical articles in a number of commercial publications. I helped a Korean SEAL write a book on martial arts, and have had my own articles in Black Belt magazine.
And I’ve done other stuff that I think makes me pretty useful an emergency situation. If you were with me in one, you might benefit from my thoughts. I tend to think quickly, and I’m usually calm when a situation is causing others to panic.
I just look stupid and dull. You would have to get beyond that before you would want to hear what I’d have to say.
So you never know. The brown-skinned guy who looks undocumented may be a trauma surgeon at Cedars-Sinai. The black guy with hoodie might be a horticulturist who can grow anything. That tiny asian girl who looks so competent and together is about to fall apart and start screaming. And the white dude who looks like a druggie… actually is on drugs.
And the stupid looking guy, who has never found clothes that fit him right, has a little orange pouch on his keychain that includes a scalpel and trach tube and a mini CPR mask, and he knows how to use them. In his trunk are some packets of QuikClot, a SAM splint, hydration liquids… a lot of things that can make the difference in an emergency situation.
Frankly, if you’re still with me at this point, you probably have very little problem with prejudging people. Or are smart enough to know that it’s an area you still have to work on. In truth, almost all of us have at least a little work left to do in this arena. And I must admit, I still catch myself having a knee-jerk reaction based on the way a person looks, even after all these years of knowing how stupid that is.
It’s hard to quickly determine what a person is really like, on the inside. But it’s harder to find out if you bolt the door before it can open. I try not to do that.
Our survival may depend on the relationship you and I create with the people around us.
