Fear of the Other

President Obama startled the unsuspecting White House press corps, and much of the country, with his unscripted remarks about race on Friday. Following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida, the President may have been feeling the pressure from the civil rights community to say something, and he delivered. But he made it clear that it really wasn’t about the verdict in the case. It was about profiling, saying that Trayvon Martin could easily have been he 35 years earlier.

That tragic incident in Florida was not about the state’s Stand Your Ground law. It was about much broader and deeper issues, starting with America’s love affair with guns, but even that’s too narrow a focus. It’s about the primal human fear of The Other.

I heard an NPR commentator – a white woman – say this morning that while she prided herself on her progressive views and her support of racial equality, the city she lives in, Washington D.C., is predominantly African-American, and that she was surprised to discover some lingering racial attitudes in her own heart.

As most of us know, prejudice is pre-judging – coming to a conclusion before all the facts are in. We do this all the time, about many things besides race, perhaps most often to ourselves. We say things like, “I’m no good at math,” and we do everything we can to avoid working with numbers, perhaps because of bad experiences with them in school. But then the day comes when our accountant is vacationing in Maui, and we have financial decisions to make on a deadline. We have to sit down at the kitchen table and figure it out. And we discover we’re not as bad at math as we thought. Numbers don’t scare us anymore, because we had no choice but to work with them.

What exactly does the expression, “Some of my best friends are Jews” mean, as an example? It doesn’t mean, “I like you in spite of the fact that you’re a Jew.” It means, “You’re my friend first, and your Jewishness is secondary” – or perhaps not an issue at all. What happens when people of different races fall in love and get married -- once a crime in many states? It means they love each other as complete human beings. It's why Mr. Obama is on this planet.

As an aside, I’ve often said that the quickest way to learn a foreign language is to fall in love with someone who doesn’t speak yours. Trust me, it leaves Rosetta Stone in the dust.

The trouble with prejudice is that there’s security in it. Everything and everybody are in their assigned places, fulfilling the roles expected of them. It’s all “sorted,” as the British like to say, so we don’t have to think about it. It goes even beyond the fear of The Other. It’s the fear of Chaos.

Some of us have a deeply ingrained resistance to having our world rocked. But the days of that kind of stability are over. Our world is being rocked almost daily now, and our preconceived notions are falling like dominoes in all kinds of fields. Perhaps that’s a good thing. Is the time coming when we will actually welcome such changes instead of fighting them?  And celebrate differences instead of fearing them?

I should live so long.