From Sam Smith’s 1997 Great American Political Repair Manual
Be friendly and respectful: In a culturally varied society, it is easy to transmit signals that are misunderstood but, fortunately, kindness, friendliness and respect come across clearly. Make good use of them.
Learn about other cultures: We typically try to resolve inter-cultural tensions without giving people a solid reason for liking one another. Mutual enjoyment and admiration provide the shortest route between two ethnicities. Education is one thing that we know reduces prejudice. Yet for all our talk about diversity, this isn't so easy to come by. We could well spend less time on abstractions of racism and more on the assets of each other's traditions.
We could be teaching, in high school anthropology classes and college seminars, the variety of the world as something to explore and enjoy, not just as a problem or an issue. You don't have to teach diversity. Diversity is. You don't have to defend it in lofty liberal rhetoric. Studying humanity's medley is not a moral act; it is simply intelligent. Limiting one's understanding to the "western intellectual canon," makes as much sense as teaching leeching to medical students or limiting one's knowledge of the universe to that data available to Copernicus. It's not that it's evil; it's just not very smart
And you don't have to learn it all in school. France became a haven for black exiles earlier this century in no small part because of French enthusiasm for jazz and African art. Similarly, jazz clubs and concerts were among the few places in segregated America that apartheid was regularly ignored.[1]
Today we are sometimes more hospitable to foreigners than we are to strangers in our own land. One notable exception is the ethnic restraurant. Why? In part because all parties involved get a fair deal out of it. In part because it is enjoyable. In part because it is natural. No one is self-conscious; no one is made to feel uncomfortable. The owner makes a good living; the customers get a good meal.
Diversity within
cultures counts as well as that between
them:
Just because jazz is important to black culture doesn't mean all blacks like
jazz. Or that colleges shouldn't recruit black cellists as well as black
forwards. Or that just because someone's white, they have to be Anglo-Saxon or
a Protestant.
Share power
fairly. One of the clearest manifestations of decency
is equitable power. In a society wedded to winner-take-all solutions, sharing power
can be difficult to achieve. But it's worth trying. One way is to learn from
children. Notice how much time they spend on whether the game is
"fair." They're on to
something.
Find something
in common that's more important than what's not: It can be a
political goal, a sport, an avocation or a business. I've seen it work in
situations as diverse as a project to train church archivists or a kid's team headed for a playoff. The
importance of ethnicity is often inversely proportional to what else we have on
our minds
Stop being shocked by prejudice. We have
attempted to exorcise racism much as Nancy Reagan tried to get rid of drugs, by
just saying no. It has worked about as well. Once we recognize the unpleasant
persistence of human discrimination, once we give up the notion that it is
merely social deviance controllable by
sanctions, we will be guided away from puritanical corrective approach towards
ones that emphasize techniques of mitigating harm, and towards activities and
attitudes that become antibiotics against prejudice.
Get real; When not on the podium or in front of a
mike, people in politics talk real talk about real things.
Like how you're going win the black vote or carry a Polish ward or not piss off
the gays. Elsewhere, then the subject of ethnicity or sex comes up, the
discussion often turns disingenuously circuitous or maddeningly abstract. This
is one time when the politicians are on the right track. Lay problems and
feelings honestly on the table and then deal with them.
Talk about it but not too much: At a meeting
called to discuss racial problems, a black activist said, "I don't want to
talk about race unless we are going to do something specific about
it." It's not a bad rule for every
public discussion of race. Unproductive talk can leave people feeling more
helpless and frustrated than when it began.
Diversity includes people you don't like. Even liberals
don't talk about this but a truly multi-cultural community will include born-again Christians opposed to abortion,
Muslims with highly restrictive views on the role of women, prayer-sayers and
atheists, Playboy readers as well as
Seventh Day Adventists. Remember that you're not required to express -- or even
have -- an opinion about everyone else in the world.
Don't sweat the small stuff. Common sense is
a great civil rights tool. Even in a multi-cultural society, loutish sophomores
are going to use tasteless language, fundamentalists will sneak in private
prayers on public occasions, and eight-year-old boys will grab girls where they
shouldn't. Hyper-reaction to such minor phenomena hurt and trivialize the cause
of human justice.
Go for the important stuff. One of the
reasons the little stuff gets such big play is because of the lack of a clear
and meaningful agenda of social justice. People wouldn't be talking so much
about who said what to whom and in what tone of voice if there was a serious
effort underway, for example, against
discrimination in such long-neglected areas such as housing and public transportation.
Try to avoid putting virtues in competition: School bussing
placed the virtue of integration in direct conflict with the virtue of
neighborhood schools. Often such conflicts can be avoided or mitigated by
choosing other tactics. For example, why was there so much attention to bussing
and so little to residential integration?
Lighten up on the lawyers. While of great
assistance in securing basic rights, lawyers are not well equipped to deal with
complex human relationships. We need to train large numbers of people who can
serve as peace-keepers, mediators, and referees.
Timely courage helps: When
anti-Semitic attacks began in Billings MT, the town responded quickly --
getting rid of Nazi symbols and posting paper menorahs in the windows of homes.
A little early courage at such times works better than a lot of belated hand
wringing.
Attack economic discrimination, too: After every group gets its rights, the powerful among
them will discriminate against the weak and the wealthy against the poor. As
Saul Alinsky said, "When the poor get power they'll be shits like everyone
else." Opposition to affirmative action might have been much less had the
programs been based on zipcode as well as on race and sex. Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out in 1964
that "the white poor also suffer deprivation and the humiliation of poverty
if not of color. They are chained by the weight of discrimination, though its
badge of degradation does not mark them. It corrupts their lives, frustrates
their opportunities and withers their education."
Stop worrying so much about language. It provides a warning sign and serves as an inter-cultural safety valve. Paul Kuritz, in an article on ethnic humor in the Maine Progressive, pointed out that "as early as 1907, the English-speaking rabbis and priests of Cleveland united to protest the Irish and Jewish stage comedians. ~ The suppression of crude ethnic humor both accompanied the economic exploitation of the lower-class work force and paralleled the dismissal of the lower classes' tastes as 'offensive' to the newly refined sensibilities of upwardly-mobile second and third generation Americans."
Kuritz, a third-generation Slovak, was arguing that the real problem with a recently fired French-Canadian radio host was not that he had made fun of his own culture but that the full panoply of ethnicity was not also represented on the air. This would have allowed all these groups to experience what anthropologists call a "joking relationship," helping to reduce tensions between potentially antagonistic clans. Said Kuritz, "As a general rule of thumb, an attempt to suppress speech as 'offensive' or 'disempowering' is not a signal to lessen the amount of talk, but to increase the amount.”
Today, inter-ethnic joking is mainly
found in rough-and-tumble environments such as
the modern vaudeville of comedy
clubs or in sports and politics, but is frowned upon by those whose social
status leads them to presume that manners create reality. The problem is
that under the latter ground rules,
words often disguise feelings, sidetrack action, and no longer
serve to keep tension and hate apart.
Be tough on leaders, not on followers: Those with tightly
defined ideas about how we should behave often make little distinction between
people who merely accept the values of their culture and those who market and
manipulate them. It helps to remember that we are all creatures of our cultures
and often speak with their voice. This may not be an admirable characteristic
but it certainly is a human one.
Make justice pay off: The modern civil
rights movement started with a bus
boycott -- and many more economic actions soon followed. Its leaders
understood that one of the easiest ways to get people to give up a
prejudice is to discover that it's costing them money. That's why you may find
more racial mixing at a shopping mall than you will in a nearby church, club or
neighborhood.
Recognize that we are all part something else. By dint of
exposure to TV alone, it is virtually
impossible to live in America and not have absorbed aspects of other cultures.
We all, in effect, belong to a part-culture, which is to say that our ethnicity
is somewhat defined by its relationship
to, and borrowing from, other cultures. There are almost no pure
anythings in America anymore. The sooner we accept and enjoy this, the better
off we'll be.
Remember that everyone is an ethnic something. There are no unethnic Americans.
