Spotted on Facebook

I saw this photo on the book of face yesterday, and I don't think I've ever seen a better distillation of my thoughts on racial issues than this. According to the original posting on FB, this photo was credited to www.tonystiles.com. I didn't chase links to confirm that. So, take it for what that's worth.

Besides...everyone knows that the green M&Ms are the best.

Pride and Prejudice

The media seems to have been in a tizzy lately touting that we are in a “post racial” America since the election of the first “black” president in Barack Obama (even though Bill Clinton tried to lay claim to that honor based on his slightly colorful ancestry). While I do not disagree that American has made great progress in overcoming its discriminatory past since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, I still have to question the accuracy of the assertion that we are in a “post racial” culture for a couple of reasons not the least of which are my own beliefs, thoughts and expectations.

First, let me tattle on myself. When you make your living dealing with people primarily over the phone, you tend to develop mental pictures of what the folks on the other end of the line look like based on the tone of their voice and the way they speak. Sometimes those mental pictures are basically accurate. Sometimes not.

For example, I attended a mediation on Wednesday in Houston. This was my first opportunity to meet my insured’s representative, as well as the plaintiff, in person. I had spoken with my insured’s representative on the phone a couple of times and had, as most of us do, formed a mental picture of him. When I met him Wednesday, for the first time, at mediation, his appearance conformed in basic details to my mental picture. Mid 40s, athletic, educated male with pale skin. In other words…someone more or less like me.

As tends to happen at mediations, after the basic details of the case have been hammered into the ground, conversation tends to switch over to cover a wide range of subjects from small talk to sports to politics. My insured’s representative mentioned at one point in the conversation that he was recently divorced.

The case we were mediating involved a business dispute in which the plaintiff, who started the business my company insured, claimed that he was wrongfully removed from his position as president and CEO by the other shareholders. This is a family owned business. So, the other shareholders were related to the plaintiff by blood and marriage. The insured representative attending mediation was one of the other shareholders as was the plaintiff’s brother. The plaintiff’s brother also happened to be the insured representative’s now former father in law.

Here is where I have to tell on myself and admit that I was completely surprised by the fact that the plaintiff/insured rep’s former uncle in law was a tall, 350+ pound man with skin the color of Hershey’s Milk Chocolate. I wasn’t expecting that.

50 years after Sammy Davis, Jr. married a woman with skin paler than his, 47 years after Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, 43 years after movie goers were shown a “mixed” couple in Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, 35 years after The Jeffersons showed America’s TV viewing audience an interracial couple (Tom & Helen) on a prime time sitcom, me growing up never having seen any direct indications of societal discrimination, etc., etc. and my mind’s eye still puts two and two together and assumes that a pale skinned guy is going to marry a pale skinned girl. And I have to ask myself why I was surprised by that unexpected development and why it matters or if it matters at all.

It’s not like I was raised by white supremacists or anything…with the possible exception of my maternal grandfather. I have my suspicions about him. Well, they’re not so much suspicions as they are well founded conclusions supported by significant circumstantial evidence. One of these days, I know I’m going to come across an old photo of a Klan rally from the 1950s and see his goofy lookin’ mug poking out of a white robe next to a burning cross. But, I digress.

I was born in 1970 to a middle class family living in a suburb of Dallas. I did not suffer the injustices of racial prejudice growing up. I have no direct memory of the struggle some people went through to fight for Civil Rights. I never had to drink from a color coded water fountain. I never had to be in a color coded school or be bussed to a school across town so that there was greater integration of “minorities” into the student population to satisfy some judge’s court order. I’ve never (to my knowledge) been discriminated against because of the color of my skin.

So, why should I give a flying flip about racial prejudice in the first place? That’s going to take some explaining. I’ll do my best. Here goes.

According to the Declaration of Independence, America’s founding fathers stated that “We hold these truths to be self evidence, that all men are created equal,…” For the moment, I want to set aside the obvious argument that slavery was alive and well at the time that sentence was written leading to the inevitable conclusion that some men were more equal than others. We’ll try to come back to that later.

Scientifically speaking, race is a meaningless term. You are either a member of a given species or you are not. If you were born from a set of parents who are of the same species and you share the same certain number of chromosomes as your parents and are capable of reproducing and giving birth to fertile offspring, you are generally considered to be a member of the same species as your parents. Individuals do not magically mutate into a new species. Evolution doesn’t work that way. Seems pretty straightforward so far, right?

Now, let’s try an analogy for a moment. Take the humble crocodile for a moment. Ugly as sin and just about as hospitable as an IRS agent with bad gas. You know what they look like. Green-ish, scaly, bad breath, sharp teeth, etc (I’m talking about the crocs…not the IRS agents). But, they mate and produce other little crocodiles (not IRS agents). However, every once in a while, there is an aberration in the genetic code resulting in an almost cute little bugger known as an albino crocodile. Instead of being green-ish, albinos are mostly white. To my knowledge, no one considers an albino croc to be of a different species than its green-ish parents.

Anthropologically speaking, race is still meaningless. Culture and language are what matter. Even though you’d be hard pressed to differentiate between a pale skinned American and a pale skinned European at a glance, there is a significant difference between the two culturally and linguistically.

What about the Bible? America’s founding fathers seem to be making a thinly veiled reference to God in the Declaration of Independence with the “created equal” bit. The book of Genesis says that God created Adam and Eve in HIS image. It doesn’t say whether they were pale skinned, dark skinned or purple. There is no indication anywhere in the Bible that someone of one skin color is superior or inferior to another.

Once you pull off the outer layer of skin, we are all pretty much look the same when you get right down to it (setting aside the obvious differences between genders). So, why do humans persist in thinking that skin color (or religion, or sexual orientation, or national origin, etc.) makes any difference at all when it comes to our species? If a human is a human is a human, why do we perpetuate prejudice in all its forms (including affirmative action, quotas, little check boxes for ethnicity on applications and forms, etc.) through the use of something as scientifically meaningless as “race”?

In my opinion, it is because of the US vs. THEM mentality. We, as humans, want to take care of those close to us. Our family. Our friends. Those people who are like US. Not those crazy people in the other trailer park. Not those…eeekkk…northerners. Not….THEM.

Blood is thicker than water as the old saying goes.

Perhaps that is why European monarchies inbred so much as a means of diplomacy. Oh no, we can’t invade England. That’s Uncle Buckie’s family. How about France? No, no. That won’t do. Aunt Marie would have a fit. Hey, we don’t have no kin in Israel. Let’s go kick some butt down there and call it a crusade to reclaim the holy land or some such.

Perhaps that is also why slaves in almost every culture were “not from around here.” Need a cheap source of labor and you can’t use your own kids (…they may be lazy but they’re family). Hey, how about the neighbor kids? No, that won’t work. Their folks will want us to pay them the going rate plus extra benefits. Here’s an idea, let’s purchase some of them funny lookin' fellers from that other country over t’ yonder and….

You get the idea.

We’re not living in a “post racial world”. If anything, we are still living in the age of racism. Our society and our culture remain obsessed with “race”.

Black or White? Caucasian or Hispanic? In a truly post racial world, these terms have no meaning.

If we were living in a post racial world, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson would not have a national audience.

If we were living in a post racial world, it would be possible for a “white” person to criticize the “black” President without being labeled a racist.

If we were living in a post racial world, groups like the KKK or the NAACP would no longer exist as they would no longer serve any purpose.

If we were living in a post racial world, companies like the one I work for would not need to provide “Diversity and Inclusion” training to avoid discrimination lawsuits.

If we were truly living in a post racial world, I would not have been surprised at a “mixed race” couple.

Does it matter? I think it does.

We are all the same. We are all humans. God does not see white people and black people. He sees only people that He made in His image. His creations which He really did make equal, and He loves them all equally.

We are all the same. We share the same planet. Our communications, our travels and our economies are global and almost instantaneous in nature. What happens over there has effects over here.

So, what do we do? For starters, stop.

Stop and think about how you think about yourself. How you think about others. How do you describe yourself or someone else to others? Have you ever really seen someone with white or black skin? I haven’t. How about we try for a little greater accuracy in how we describe physical attributes? To use The Queen’s favorite phrase…”Use Your Words.”

Stop asking for or providing meaningless and irrelevant information. A person’s skin color or ancestry has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not they are fit to obtain a loan or capable of performing a job.

Stop supporting organizations that perpetuate “racism” through membership criteria or ideology.

Stop asking me to feel guilty for something in which I never participated.

Stop using something that never happened to you as an excuse for failing to achieve.

Stop assuming that he or she is just like THEM and see if they might be like you.

If you believe what The Bible teaches, we are all related at one point or another.

Which means that there really is no THEM. There is only US.

How Much?

As mentioned in the previous couple of posts, I spent Monday in Austin at a mediation attempting to negotiate the settlement of an accident involving a fatality. It’s never easy to sit across the table from people who have lost their loved one(s) to an accident or tragedy and tell them how sorry you are for their loss and then explain the reasons why you don’t think your insured is liable for that loss. It borders on the hypocritical sometimes. It makes the entire process even more crass when you have to tell them the obvious that there is no way for you to bring their loved one back and the only thing you can offer them is money.

Though it’s been demanded of me in the past, I am not in the position to offer written apologies or confessions of criminal guilt on behalf of my insured. Though I’ve been accused of it, I am not a member of the Klan nor do I think I am God. I am simply the poor schmuck left in the position of having to put a price on the value of a human life taken away by accident. I am the purchasing agent of tragedy if you want to look at it that way. Unfortunately, by engaging in the claims process, claimants put themselves in the position of being purveyors and sellers of human life and tragedy.

Some have said that life is priceless; and, indeed, every day each one of us has in which we are upright and able to take nourishment is a gift we can’t buy in any store. However, in my world (and, by extension, the world of claimants), each one of those days has a value and a price.

America’s founding fathers want you to believe that all men are truly created equal. Unfortunately, when it comes to placing a value of the lives of different people, fate and circumstance dictate that equality is a fiction that knows no boundaries, racial, ethnic or otherwise.

It’s a funny thing to have to put a value on a human being’s existence. Lots of things need to be considered. Who were they? What did they do? Did they have family? Did they have a long life expectancy? Did they earn a lot of money or none at all? Where and how did they meet their demise? Did they or the insured my company represents do anything wrong to contribute to the accident? Does their family or estate have a good attorney capable of actually making a case against my company’s insured, or is the attorney a lying, cheating, ambulance chasing scumbag who never tries a case? And, unfortunately, will the potential jurors of the venue where the lawsuit would be tried have any bias against the parties to the lawsuit?

Yes, sad as it is to say, people are just as parochial and, dare I say, racist now as they were 50 or 100 years ago. It is true that some of the more obvious signs of bias and prejudice have been hidden by years of the civil rights movement, affirmative action and “diversity and inclusion” training as my company likes to call it; however, the truth remains that we are still human. Prejudice and bias are part of the human condition. It’s human nature to view those who are different than ourselves and see “them” as “different” than “us.” We like to think we are protecting “us” from “them” or taking care of “our own.”

All these questions and more are factored into what a particular person’s life is worth to a particular set of people on a given day. I’ve seen cases in which young children whose only sin in life was being at the wrong place at the wrong time were “worth” nothing. I’ve seen a case in which a suburban house wife with a cheating husband was “worth” millions. There is no rhyme or reason. Each case is unique. It’s viewed through a very jaded prism of circumstance and the best estimate of what a hypothetical jury of one’s peers will decide a case is worth at a hypothetical trial of the facts.

As one might expect from the fact that I’m writing about this, my work tends to make me a tad bit introspective. What is the value of my own life? I know, more or less, what the dollar sum total of my life insurance benefits would be after funeral expenses, paying off debts and whatever taxes Uncle Sam deems necessary to steal from The Queen. But, what about how I’ve impacted the world? How, if at all, have I made this world a better place? Have I contributed anything of lasting value to anyone, or have I just coasted through this world without leaving any trace? Am I worth millions or worthless?

The Queen tells me she wouldn’t trade me for any amount of money which is comforting (although I think she might consider renting me out in exchange for a Corvette or Cadillac XLR). As I’ve said before, I really don’t think I deserve her (or anyone else’s) admiration. There are times when I feel worth less than the proverbial warm bucket of spit. It’s just that I feel like I can and should be doing more with my life than I am.

One of the reasons I started writing was to, hopefully, leave something meaningful behind to those who follow. To make people laugh, cry and, yes, even think once in a while. To those who have taken the time to follow my deranged ramblings, I simply say thanks. It’s nice to know there are others out there that find some measure of meaning in my words.

The News is all Happy and Gay

Even though it’s usually depressing, I try to keep abreast of the news so that I have at least a vague idea of what’s going on in the world around me. I still remember going to a retreat up in the mountains of Washington state which was so far removed from any contact with civilization that there was no phones, no radio, no TV and no internet access. You’d only see a newspaper if someone brought one with them when they arrived. However, after spending a week on the side of that mountain with no contact with the outside world or modern conveniences like cars, I was stunned to find out how alien everything in our modern society felt. It was absolutely wonderful, and I’ve been meaning to go back there for years.

On the other side of the coin, I was also stunned to learn that people wondered what planet I had come from when I said I had no idea Princess Diana had died in a car wreck while I was busy communing with nature. Why couldn’t I have been there when Michael Jackson died instead?

Now, the other day, I read a news article that President Obama has nominated a policewoman from Minnesota to be the first openly gay U.S. Marshal. My first reaction was: Why is this news? Did she cheat on her taxes, too? Apparently not. The brief news story makes mention of the president’s rocky relationship with the gay community and specifically his pledge to end the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in the US military despite his lack of concrete efforts to do so. It reminds me of an Bloom County cartoon from the 1980s in which Milo is calling NASA about shuttle launches back when NASA was making a big push to get the first [fill in the minority/ethnic/special interest group here] into space. Milo asks if NASA had launched a blind, Indian contortionist or some such and the NASA spokesman said “Yep, he went up this morning.”

I’ve never thought of myself as homophobic. I just plain don’t understand why a man or a woman would look at another person of the same sex with lust in their heart to borrow a phrase from Jimmy Carter (and to think that man won the Nobel Peace Prize), and let’s not talk about lopitoffamy or addalittletomy surgical “interventions”. That just makes my skin crawl to think of looking at an original, standard equipment item attached to your own body that’s functioning properly and not cancerous and decide you can’t stand the thought of living with it another day so badly that you pay good money to have it removed. Uh, uh. No thank you, sir. Step away from me with those sharp objects.

So, this news story, to me at least, is a thinly veiled article about progress the administration is making towards ending discrimination against homosexuals. Despite the fact that I am a committed, life-long heterosexual, I have always wondered what sexual orientation has to do with what a person does for a living. As far as I’m concerned, the only criteria beyond education and prior work experience is whether or not a person is physically capable of performing the duties and responsibilities of a particular occupation. For instance, I’d love to be able to earn a living as an airshow pilot; however, I am not sure that I’m physically capable of keeping myself from puking through a 10 minute aerobatics routine. Does that mean I’m being discriminated against?

Then, today, I see another news article about the administration’s efforts on behalf of the gay community (http://apnews.myway.com/article/20091014/D9BB3IIO0.html). This article makes no bones about the fact that the administration is working to end workplace discrimination against the gay community. Okay, fine. More power to you; but, really, how far do we need to go with this?

I mean, seriously, do we need to be adding more groups to the list of protected classes? I think we have more than enough of those already. I think the fact that we even have to have a list of protected groups is a sad commentary on us as human beings. Think about it for a minute. Companies are in business to make money. Non-profit groups exist to effectively achieve a certain goal or provide a certain service while wasting the least amount of resources necessary. They should WANT the best, most productive person for the job regardless of what the look like, which god they worship or who they pick up in bars; and, yet, here we are still dealing with discrimination in the 21ST freaking century since Jesus came down from on high to show us the way.

Does that mean we have to force people under penalty of law to do what’s in their best interests? Have any of the government’s affirmative action efforts to coerce people into being “diverse” changed anyone’s attitude about anything? I doubt it. I still hear racist jokes and religious jokes, hear stories of sexual harassment and glass ceilings, and more. We’re still seeing a culture of thin skinned victimization reported in the media, and you can’t disagree with President Obama without people looking throw your dresser drawers for a Klan robe. The only thing I’ve seen discrimination laws do is keep lawyers busy like they needed any help with that.

I tend towards a healthy dose of common sense in my opinions. I think an employer should be entitled to seek out workers who fit within the culture and demographic of their business to more effectively work within an industry or market. Does it make sense to force a fundamentalist Christian organization to hire an openly gay or transgender person as a lead spokesperson? Probably not. Does it make sense to hire a person who barely has a command of the English language and speaks with a heavy accent that no native born Texan can understand to sit in a customer service or help desk call center? No, it doesn’t AT&T. Neither of those scenarios make sense.

My feeling is this: If a business person is too stupid or small minded to over look their own prejudices so that they can hire the best person for the job and pay that person according to the value they bring to the company, that company deserves to lose money. Their competitors won’t always make the same mistake. Unfortunately, a distressing number of them do.