Students at Yale Divinity School have put of signs around campus designed to promote environmental awareness. The signs run a gamut of factoids, but one in particular ended up on my desk because it contained a short debate that quickly pointed out the need to think more carefully and clearly about the relationship between environmental justice and climate change -- and, more pointedly, the ways in which race and racism are a part of both movements.
The sign was posted outside one of our lecture classrooms, and I passed it often during the course of a day. It featured this factoid: "71% of African American live in counties in violation of Federal air pollution standards, compared to 58% of the White population." The debate began when someone anonymously wrote on the sign, "Because most (~65%) of those 71% don't do anything to get better. Sometimes they don't even try! Don't look at color, look at fruit of your life!" Written over this was "CHECK YOUR ASSUMPTIONS." An incoming African American student decided that the ensuing back and forth that was developing on the sign was not something to be debated anonymously and took down the sign.
I've sat with this for a week allowing a variety of emotions and responses to roll past my screen. The chances are high that the folks who engaged in this back and forth are part of the divinity school community -- a sobering thought for a teacher who tries to encourage students to embrace the diversities in our midst as a gift from God rather than as threat or somehow a sinister menace. Yes, to live into our diversities will and should challenge our ways of living when they are a monochromatic salute to narrow self interests and fear masquerading as patriotism or viable spirituality. But this debate signals even more that troubles me in our emerging postmodern era: the ways in which we can attack each other (be it road rage or warfare between nations, or in chat rooms and emails) and fail to engage one another as human beings. We turn to the use of our anger or statistics or the solace of like-minded people without having to provide a human-to-human accounting to and with each other when we have differing viewpoints or belief systems.
We often hide behind such phrases as "culture wars" or "clash of civilizations." These phrases make it far too easy for us to shrug our shoulders, build higher walls, dig deeper trenches, and refuse to examine why we seem to have an ever-growing fear of each other because we are becoming more diverse as a nation and more pluralistic religiously. Ultimately, I think, our desire to control what we know and possess what we have keeps us from living into the challenges of grace, humility, love, and sharing.Living into diversity (rather than scribbling our fears on scraps of paper or building supremacist web sites of many persuasions) takes a good deal more work, self-examination, and commitment to building a deep democracy. For Christians, this is working to bring in the kingdom of God and God's good reign in our lives.
We begin this work of faithful living by building toward getting to know each other by fostering genuine conversations. I have been heartened that students at the divinity school have been working to do this all year. My hope is that we will continue these conversations, say the things we believe, risk being wrong (or right), and continue to dig deeper into our imaginations to uncover the stereotypes and caricatures that we have about one another. In short, we begin by talking and listening. We stop relying on sound bites and gerrymandered statistics and begin with one another in face-to-face encounters. And we refuse to believe that one conversation, or coming to know one person who is different from us, is enough. It is only the beginning.