Separate but miserable

The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.

Your pure sadness
that wants help
is the secret cup.

-Rumi

The city of Toronto has a beautiful motto: "Diversity our Strength." It almost makes me want to move there (until I remember what February is like in Toronto) --not just because it is home to people of diverse backgrounds, but because the city actually recognizes this convergence of colors, ethnicities, and perspectives as a source of power.

In my home state, Michigan, an out-of-state millionaire has brought his money here to wage war on affirmative action and any other public program that would provide outreach or aid to a particular ethnic or racial group, or to any one gender. He and his followers think that a constitutional amendment banning any sort of race-based or gender-based programs would make things more "fair." What it will really do for me, of course, is to make things more "white"-- things like: my town, my university, and my daughter's public magnet school (where the ongoing efforts to attract more families of color would be made illegal by this amendment).

This sort of color-blind "fairness" only looks fair if you use the most severely limited lens--the one that does not see the past or the future or even the present reality where, clearly there is nothing "fair" about what has happened or what continues to happen to people of color in the United States.

I want this awful anti-affirmative action proposal to fail spectacularly. I need affirmative action for selfish reasons. I am white. (I would say that I am caucasian, but I have a dear friend from Azerbaijan and she is an honest-to-God Caucasian, but people often see her curly hair and broad features and think that she is part African-American and the whole thing just makes me feel silly about calling myself "caucasian.") My daughter and husband are white. Most of the people in my town are white. "Lack of Diversity Our Weakness." We could engrave that on the city hall. Still, my small town is more "diverse" than most, and more welcoming of diversity, when we have the chance.

I grew up in Cleveland, where lots of African-Americans live, except that I never saw them, unless you count whoever I could see from the inside of a locked, fast-moving car. The Cleveland of my childhood was one of the most segregated cities I have ever seen, and people there were afraid of each other. I lived in Cleveland and several of its suburbs for most of my first eighteen years, and I never spoke to an African-American person during that time. I never saw an African-American child at any of the huge public schools I attended.

My experience, many years later, is that this de facto, but aggressively enforced segregation (and the fear and bigotry it inevitably produced in all of us who were affected by it) has left me with a profound and constant feeling of grief--the same grief of separation that Rumi says draws us toward union--union with the divine, union with all things, union with all beings, union with all people.

I became aware of this grief only when I started to feel its absence; when I was finally given the opportunity to meet and to care about people who were not white. I noticed after a while that what I felt, and what I feel every week when I go to my beautiful church with its congregation of many colors, is relief--relief to cross the divide for a while, relief from my segregated life, relief from separation, the joy of union.

There are plenty of reasons we need to keep reaching out to and helping people who have not historically or presently been given the same help and opportunities that white men have always had, but I am thinking today about my own selfish reasons. I am thinking about the unfairness of it all. I am thinking that I grew up surrounded by a rich African-American culture and all I got was fear and ignorance. I am thinking that my daughter deserves better. My daughter deserves the strength that comes from diversity. I don't know why an out-of-state millionaire wants to take away her chance to live and study with people who are not just like her. It doesn't seem fair. To anybody.