Opinion: When unfamiliarity breeds contempt

Common sense and the Good Book each truthfully attest that a house divided cannot stand.

Nowhere is that great truth more applicable – and willfully ignored – than when looking across the great gulf fixed that is American race relations, circa 2017.

In interacting with, and understanding each other across, racial, ethnic, or religious differences, an American schizophrenia around this topicis never far from the surface.

How so? In part, because we look first to the real progress we’ve made so far. Many, if not most people, have decent relations, if not warm friendships, with people whose origin differs from their own. One-on-one we more readily see people as human beings; and we minimize and look past differences as we lock hands around a common ground of humanity.

The flipside comes when individuals gaze across our self-dug chasms toward the “Other.” That’s where we can quickly get into trouble. When our minds turn to words like “them” and “they” to categorize and judge different groups against whatever “us” we identify with, there’s grave risk for society when a natural human impulse travels too far and begins to run amok.

People are dying unnecessarily as a result. Some of the names are familiar because they’ve made headlines. Riots and civil disorder have resulted from such deaths, further hardening lines of demarcation and division. Repeating names here would cause some to read no further and hack the trenches of separation even deeper into bedrock.

Animus toward “the Other” breeds a pathology that we believe is antithetical to both human decency and the U.S. Constitution’s preamble charge to “We the People.”

No American of goodwill likely believes this standoff of a status quo is either desirable or acceptable. We must begin to move away from the ramparts of discord, and edge toward any common ground that’s still there, hidden in a dense fog of suspicion and anger.

An effective route to reconciliation begins at ground level, we believe – in our subdivisions, houses of worship, front porches and elsewhere. The political class reaps too many votes and other perks from what we’ll call the American Troubles to lead us anywhere near a solution. Their vested interests too-often lie in keeping the barbed-wire barriers of division in good repair.

It is instead up to us, one-on-one, to act on a better path forward. That is the value of the experience powerfully relayed in the July 23 installment of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s ongoing “Re:Race” project. Reporter Rosalind Bentley chronicled the process endured by members of two Roswell churches – one largely white, the other predominantly African-American.

Aside from race, members of both congregations who took part in ongoing conversations were stunningly similar in demography. That shouldn’t be a surprise, but too often it is. Call it the great, hidden lesson of American race relations – the camouflaged fact that, more often than not, we really do have more in common than not.

Remembering that point likely made a small bit easier the powerful, at-times painful conversations that the group undertook. The effort centered on learning more about race around the context of the loss of seven men to race-related homicide. Two were black men killed by police; five were police officers shot dead by an African-American sniper in Dallas.

The AJC story traveled with the congregants toward what a headline called “Revelation & Reconciliation.” That is an apt phrase, but it undersells a long, tough reach across the racial dividethat spans the breadth of today’s America.

It was a difficult process for participants to peel back layer upon layer of canards, mistrust, skepticism, and fear of either their own vulnerability or of taking the risk of destroying long-held, but wrong, assumptions about “the Other.”

The lay members who stepped up and the ministers who helped begin the effort were brave to face the crisis of race relations 2017-style, and move forcefully to positively address it. Their can-do spirit is much more in keeping with American ideals than the dismayingly common tendency these days to hurl insults at each other or hug outdated, if not baldly false, destructive narratives and tribal folklore.

It would have been far easier indeed for the Roswell participants to have stayed in their own cul-de-sacs of familiar, racially divided comfort. That would maintain the norm of a Sunday morning worship pattern that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called the most segregated hour in America.

Kudos to the North Fulton conversants for breaking that pattern. We believe the kind of structured, small-group conversation they pursued should catch fire and spread across this great region and nation. The principles they organized around make sense and seem oriented toward achieving broadly shareable results and positive societal change. That’s the opposite of the acidic, self-righteous one-upmanship evidenced by social media rants and angry protests today. The “Conversations” guide read by the Roswell group stressed that “We are here to learn and to connect, not to prove a point or demand affirmation.” Achieving that would be a big start.

For an America riven for too long by ongoing racial trauma and divides, that is wise counsel indeed. It should be heeded by all of us. Ignoring it will cause more people to die needlessly.