On Monday the FBI released its annual report and stated that hate crimes have risen nearly 8% in the past year. “Hate crimes” are criminal incidents that specifically are found to target victims or property as a result of bias against a particular race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnic or national origin, or physical or mental disability. Of course this list does not include gender, although the presence of misogynistic tendency in crimes such as physical and verbal abuse, rape, spousal abuse, etc. could arguably include those as part of this category. (Don Imus, for example, did not commit a crime.) They also don’t include behaviors that do not meet the standard of “criminal activity,” nor those that are not as obviously impacted by the group identity of the victim. The passing insult to a Muslim; the shadowing of the young African American shopper, but not the young white one; the enduring public statements of contempt towards gay and lesbian couples that their children hear from political and religious leaders on the nightly news, etc. Sadly, the list could be endless. When we take all of these into account as well, we can see a continuing pervasive challenge to our fundamental social order.
The rise of these incidents is appalling, and what is most appalling is that they are only the tip of the iceberg. Or, perhaps more appropriately stated: a snowball sitting on the tip of the iceberg. They stick up from under the surface to show us the underbelly; that what is seen is still persistent patterns of attitudes and behaviors that are driven by both our conscious and unconscious attitudes towards diversity.
Yet there are still many people, including intelligent, decent people, who seem to turn a deaf ear to the pain these kinds of incidents evoke, and to the larger dynamic in society that they display for all of us to see, if we were only willing to look. We minimize them. We seem to want to believe that discrimination is gone in society. After all, we passed the civil rights bills. Jim Crow is no longer around and public accommodations are legally restricted from preventing people access.
What makes us want to believe what is so obviously not true?
I think our overall insensitivity to the blinding reality of how difference still impacts our world view is driven my many different things: callousness and disregard for the concerns of others is certainly one aspect. Another is that we don’t want to feel responsible, or even guilty for what we see. It is easier to pretend they are not as prevalent or significant as they are.
But I maintain that these aspects are actually less of a threat than the more pervasive tendency of people to see the world through our own experience, and think it is the “real world” that we are seeing, rather than our own interpretation of the world around us. It harkens back to an ancient quote from the Talmud, often attributed to the writer Anais Nin: “We see the world not as it is, but as we are.”
What we don’t always understand is that we may have unseen motivation under this blindness. In other words, blindness about the blindness. Why? Because it makes us feel better to live in a society in which we believe that people are treated fairly. We have been told, perhaps even brainwashed to believe that that is what America is about. And so we ignore the reality around us because it is uncomfortable, and because we either don’t know what to do about it or simply are too busy with our own concerns to worry about it. It has been said that “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.” On the contrary, it can be a deft coping strategy that allows us to ignore things that we don’t want to believe about our society, or about ourselves. And none of us is immune to this blindness, no matter how “evolved” we think we may be.
People construct elaborate rationale for their denial. I recently had an exchange with a blogger who described himself as “libertarian,” and was critical of any legal code that protected people based on group identity, comparing these kinds of anti-discrimination or anti-hate crime legislations to Hitler’s attempts to identify and isolate the Jews. His point was that it really doesn’t matter if somebody is beaten up because they are gay, for example…what matters is that they were beaten up. And to some degree that is true. A person who is randomly assaulted is just as much in pain as one who is assaulted because of their group identity. However, what this view doesn’t take into account is that additional sense of fear, anguish, ongoing separation and current and past pain that nooses, foul pictures, insulting language, and abusive characterizations of people of any group leave in our social order.
And it is critical to note that our blindness to all of these “feelings” leads to a blindness to suffering. Last week I had the privilege of conducting a planning session for the American Dental Association on the Tamaya Pueblo reservation in New Mexico. The ADA, the Indian Health Service, Dental School educators and people who serve or are members of 50-60 Native American or Native Alaskan tribes came together to create a plan to reduce dental disparities for Native peoples. Why? Because Native peoples suffer from 400-500% of the dental problems that others do. Just like health disparities impact communities of color throughout the nation. Just like our legal system convicts more dark skinned Black men to die in criminal cases than lighter ones.
How many people realize that disparities like this exist?
Anybody who thinks that diversity is no longer an issue in our society is simply not looking.
Every day we all…all of us, of all races, ethnicities, sexual orientations, both genders, etc….all of us walk out into the world and have an opportunity to see what is going on around us. We have an opportunity to see the pain and fear in the faces of people walking by us on the street; or working across the desk from us; or walking into our stores and places of business; or living next door; or even, sometimes in our own houses. We have a choice: we can either look at each other’s faces and see what is really there, and look into our own hearts and see what is really there, and be responsible for it. Or we can ignore it.
It’s time to stop pretending.
