Racism and Reality

Mark Cuban is the billionaire owner of the NBA Dallas Mavericks. He’s not the typical team owner. At games, he acts like a fan – wearing t-shirts and jeans, berating referees and even storming onto the court when he sees a bad call. Unlike a fan, though, the refs don’t eject Cuban for his behavior. Instead, he gets fined – $1.6 million and counting.

Cuban doesn’t think twice about the fines. He’s rich enough to say whatever he darn well pleases – courtside and anywhere else. The latest comment that raised eyebrows was his admission that he’d cross the street if he saw a black kid in a hoodie late at night.

Cuban said what many of us won’t even admit to ourselves – No one is initially comfortable with people who appear different.

Part of our human survival mechanism – a vestige of the fight-or-flight response of our prehistoric ancestors – is that we constantly gauge our environment to determine how we should behave. That mechanism is why we drop our guard among friends but pay close attention when we’re in unfamiliar situations. Think of the teenager who visits Grandma in the nursing home. Or the introvert who takes a wrong turn into a rowdy biker bar. And there isn’t a man in the world who reacts the same way in a roomful of ladies as he would in a sports bar with the guys.

Engaging our radar when we see someone of another race does not make us racist – no more than it makes Junior an ageist, or the sports fan a sexist. It makes us human. But our natural defense mechanism can become racism when we don’t separate the person from the packaging. It may sound easy.  It’s not.

Recently, at dusk during a steamy drive through the backroads of the Florida Panhandle, it became obvious I needed a caffeine boost to get safely back to Jacksonville. I pulled into the dimly-lit parking lot of a run-down convenience store. To reach the door, I needed to get by a young man who was chatting with a young lady. A well-muscled young black man. With lots of tattoos. Wearing a white “wifebeater” t-shirt, do-rag, and baggy jeans drooping halfway to his knees exposing at least 12 inches of plaid boxer shorts.

What would you do?

I could have walked a wide circle around him. Foolish and disrespectful, I thought. Instead, avoiding eye contact, I mumbled “excuse me” as I started to brush by him. The young man brightly said, “Here you go” as he turned to make room. I cracked a half-smile, partly in relief, as I walked inside.

A few minutes later, the man and woman had moved their conversation to the drink cooler, right in front of the glass door where my Diet Mountain Dew was hiding. The man sensed he was blocking my way, smiled, and moved down the aisle saying, “I’m sorry, sir. There you go.” Sir. More manners than at least a couple of my daughter’s prep school dates from her teenage years. I returned his smile, said a big ‘thank you,’ and, re-caffeinated, drove 130 miles safely home.

It’s smart to be wary of strangers. But it’s not okay to assume we know a person’s character by color, clothes or other characteristic. Yes, that sounds pretty obvious – even insulting – until you’re in a dark parking lot or some other unfamiliar place when ideals come face-to-face with reality. How we handle those situations help shape how we view people who appear to be different – but may not be so different after all.

The Hobby Lobby Cacophany

A plea to everyone on both sides of the Hobby Lobby debate – please take one deep breath and two steps back. The person you’re glaring at on the other side of the issue is not evil – not a baby-killer, not a misogynist. He or she is simply a person with another point of view, most likely developed through reasoned, logical thought. You probably don’t think that view is legitimate. But, like it or not, in the pluralistic society established by the US Constitution, it is legitimate.

Competing constitutional rights often collide. This particular case is especially volatile because it involves two of our most basic guarantees – equal protection under the law, and freedom of religion. The Affordable Care Act – Obamacare – mandates all employers provide certain types of contraception to all female employees. There is a narrow exemption for religious organizations and their direct affiliates for the contraception mandate only.

The owners of two closely held corporations, Hobby Lobby, who are Pentecostals, and Conestoga Wood Specialties, who are Mennonites, claimed they should also be exempt, saying the mandate violates their religious belief that certain types of contraception are immoral. A divided U.S. Supreme Court agreed, ruling that the closely held corporations – corporations owned and/or managed by small groups of businesspeople or companies – should, indeed, be exempt.

That’s the two paragraph thumbnail. Arguments don’t fit well into thumbnails, so I won’t even try, at least not now. Today, I have only one goal – to promote civil discourse in a system that is and always will be adversarial. That means respecting the other side’s right to present its argument, even though you may reject the merits of that argument. Can you do that?

A few weeks ago, during a discussion on journalistic ethics in my Communication Theory class, I needed to give an on-the-fly example of the difference between something that is perfectly legal, but also considered immoral. The first thing that came to mind was divorce. As a societal function, divorce is completely acceptable. There are no direct civil penalties. The Catholic Church, however, believes sacramental marriage is permanent and, therefore, divorce and remarriage is immoral.

American society easily accommodates the religious objection to divorce because it only affects a Catholic’s relationship with the Church, not the law. But the contraception objection does conflict with civil law. Hence the Supreme Court’s need to balance the legitimate legal right to equal protection under the law, with the legitimate right to resist actions defined by a religion as immoral.

As in most conflicts between what’s legal and what’s moral, there’s not much wiggle room. Those who object for religious reasons should remember that the U.S. is not a “Christian nation,” but a nation founded mainly by Christians who saw the wisdom of keeping religious institutions out of the business of governing, while at the same time allowing everyone the right to worship freely without government interference. And those who believe religious protections are secondary should recognize that the law is always a balancing act, and that the Founding Fathers so valued freedom of religion they included it in the First Amendment, not the second, third, or tenth.

The tone of the argument is critical because there will always be disagreements. One function of religious communities in our civic discourse is to argue the moral basis for good law and moral enforcement, while policy advocates should recognize the legitimacy of deeply-held religious beliefs. We can’t expect competing sides to ever come to a consensus. But we should expect a civil, respectful debate. That’s something the ideals of both sides require.

Vacation Over

When the Eagles reunited in 1994, Glen Frey noted, “We never broke up, we just took a 14-year vacation.” Well, I never really stopped writing, I simply took a 3-and-a-half year vacation from posting here.

Vacation over.

Some changes since then have been rather abrupt. Obamacare. A new pope. New gay marriage and marijuana laws. But most changes have been incremental, often masking their significance. A widening income gap between the richest one percent of Americans and the rest of us – the widest since the 1920s. An increasingly unproductive Congress. And a steadily growing political, economic, social and personal partisanship that insists on defining us more by our differences than our similarities.

It’s no surprise that a great majority of Americans believe we’re heading in the wrong direction. Despite that, too many interest groups continue to insist their solutions are the only solutions for setting things right. And that lack of respect for others can only mean greater division and even more turmoil.

The original purpose of this blog was to prompt readers to keep an open mind and think. That hasn’t changed. So here’s my challenge to you – Join the site, take a chance, and challenge yourself by trying to see things from other points of view. With any luck, we’ll test the Marketplace of Ideas theory and actually give truth a fighting chance.