Yes we can, together - photo by Salim Virji
On a recent Ron Reagan radio show on Air America, there was a discussion of race. I felt compelled to write him an email, shown below.
Dear Ron,
I was listening to your show the other day when the discussion revolved around the dust-up between Dr. Gates and Sgt. Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department. I wanted to call in, but since I use a pay-as-you-go phone, I didn’t want to be on hold for an extended period of time; I was in my car; and what I wanted to say would end up dominating the show, which of course you couldn’t let happen
I was struck by a comment you made referring to tribal conflict. This is something I’ve written about, talked about, and think lies at the heart of most of the conflict between humans the world over.
The basis of what I have come to believe, after years of thinking about the issue, is that we have a deeply ingrained instinct toward belonging to tribes. And, I think this instinct goes as far back as the human species, and before that, our primate ancestors.
Without writing a book here, it goes something like this. When we climbed down out of the trees and began to walk about collecting food, we had a limited range because we were afoot, and we were rather small creatures.
As we were not the only primates to venture down out of the trees, that meant that not too far away there were other groups of primates — tribes if you will — who were similarly exploring the earth.
This would have created a problem for each of these groups of primates/humans because the limited range of their foraging meant their territory could only support a certain number in their clan, and any trespassing on the part of nearby clans endangered our very existence.
Over time, and this was almost certainly a very long time — thousands of years, perhaps more — we evolved ways to differentiate our tribe from neighboring tribes. We did this by how we dressed (once we had decided to wear clothing which may in large part been because of the need to identify our tribe or other tribes), body art, unique language, and I think it’s entirely possible that the survival instinct was so strong that it may even have affected our physical appearance in terms of color, hair, etc.
As time went on, we became more adept at developing unique social groups, not only as I’ve mentioned, but as religions evolved, with forms of government, music, and food. All of these made us distinct from other tribes.
This drive was so strong that it literally altered our brains so that any time we encountered a person who looked, sounded, or acted differently from our tribe, a warning flag immediately went up warning us that this person was potentially a threat to our well being. We perfected the art of discrimination as part of our journey to becoming the highest animal on the planet.
We no longer need fear people who look or sound different, but millions of years of conditioning are not likely to be wiped away overnight. We are, most of us, hard-wired to be racist, and discriminators. That is what I think we need to first understand as humans — that it is natural to feel uneasy, or even threatened by someone from another tribe.
I listened to a man on TV many years ago. I seem to recall his name was Dr. Brown. He was a black man talking about racism, and telling his audience that, like an alcoholic, you can’t find a cure for your problem until you admit you have one; that everyone in that class was a racist and that once they accepted that fact, they could then move on to try to change their behavior. His message struck a chord with me.
Assuming my premise/theory is viable, and we all accept that we have these racist tendencies, we can then make a conscious decision to begin altering our thought patterns. We will understand why we feel threatened or uncomfortable around people not of our tribe, and then we can make the decision not to act on these now-extinct feelings and deal with people as equals, not rivals or threats to our well being.
What we are talking about is literally reversing evolution as it pertains to tribalism. This won’t be an easy, or short-term task. It needs to be at the forefront of our national and international dialogue, discussed repeatedly and often, inviting others to disagree so that we work through all the excuses that some might make for keeping discrimination and tribalism alive.
Obviously, there are older generations who are beyond re-learning, but children are the future, and in spite of the influence of older generations they’re in contact with, we can and should have a program in our schools to teach our children how to resist the instinct to discriminate. The government should run PSAs on TV and radio the way they have with other important issues, and the government at every level should work with the various churches to encourage them to join in the war against racism, sexism, and whatever the ism is for religious discrimination.
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Yes we can change our world, but each of us in our daily lives has to make a commitment to stop discriminating, putting people down because of how they look, what they wear, their status in society, their religion or lack of it, their sexual orientation, and all the other ways we find to demean others, whether in jest, out of hatred, or simply to elevate ourselves in the eyes of others.
If this world is to ever see the end to warfare and violence, we have to start by eliminating hatred and discrimination of all kinds. Our children are watching us and learning — decide what you want to teach them.
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