Objectivism And Ethnic And Cultural Diversity

[Rdyson]

Ok, here goes. This semester it seems that in many of my classes the topic of raceism has come up. I generally welcome such stimulating conversation and feel no objection. However, the first time I really sat down and watched in my class a well -known video called, "The Color of Fear" I could not keep still. My body began to have uncontrolled reactions. My feet would stomp on the floor, My eyes would roll, and often I jerked my chair back and forth. I guess the truth was that what these men said made me angry, it made me disappointed, and seemed to solidify my belief that barriers are created in the mind no matter what age, gender, adn color you are.

Some History...

I am white, my ancesters came over on the Mayflower and George Washington can be found about halfway down on my family tree. This not to say that I am white as white can be but I am pretty white.So when I found my blood boiling over inside there was an immediate action to try and calm my senses but like most other times in my life my mouth would not remain closed. I was the first one to shoot my hand in the air anxious with questions. Why, I thought why. These people in this film were sitting around in a circel crying becasue they were frightened, becasue they were a different color, becasue they had grown up poor. They were telling each other and the camera that society had done this, that the police had done this, that "there parents had pulled on their boot straps until those dam boot straps came off". Another famous line was, "man when I see a black man in a suite walking down the side of the road I think, man I bet that man can't wait to get home and be a black man again." Watching the movie I clearly felt their anger, their resentment, and their frustration.

As a developing counselor, I am keenly intuned to these feelings and naturally I ask why. It isn't as if I do not see that they are African American and that I do not see that they may be treated differently and that there was and has always been a natural and often tragic need by humans to form groups and discriminate against those that are feared, different, and who share different beliefs.

I know I ramble but I love to write and it flows for me. Please hold in there with me.

I guess what I am slowly getting at is, look at all this time these men in the video or wasting by crying, huddled in a therapy group. Look at their tears, look at the energy that could have been spent in some productive means other than self- pity and sorrow. No sooner than I had thought this my head began spinning and I knew that anger and sadness are just the first stages in recovery. Underneath all of that anger is sadness and underneat the sadness is light. Hopefully. At least that is what I had been taught but I have never witnessed this with my own eyes. Again I was spinning thinking what if under the men's anger was not sadness but just anger again? Wouldn't that statement be subjective and who made that statement? Thinking in this wild pattern I ended up right back where I had started, upset at the men's anger.

What this long winded monologue boils down to is yes, people have hardship and many times that hardship is society induced and that yes, people of color have been and still are recieving disturbing racial messages. However, this issue is most deffienatly a two -sided coin. In my mind, experienceing the act of predjudice and internalizing it and allowing that ignorance and hate become a part of your life for any second is a crime as is the spreading of hate in any form.

At what point do you realize that yes, you have been unjustly treated by others and yes, you will continue to move forward even if you are left without the use of your boot straps to pull on?

How do Objectivists view this issue? I understand the hurdle of racism as; the man or woman who seeks intelligence and possess a natural curiousity and wonder about the world around him/ her, the person who builds him/herself to be self- sufficient, and loves themselves and in turn loves the world aroud him, will discover that racism will effect them less or not at all if he or she has the ability to reach complete self- actualization as proposed by Maslow. This is not to say that they will not go through hardship, unfairness, and sorrow when seeing hate before their eyes but instead that they will not let it stop them.

Picture this, two people are being judged for the most complete and meaningful life lived. Now lets say that one man is white or European American and the other is African American. The white man begins and is carried by a strong wind. The African American man begins and is beat in the head by a violent rush of air. The white man may recieve a fine education, may marry and have children, he may be faithful to his wife or he may not, he may save for his children's education or he may not. At the end of his life as he lays down for his final rest he may look back on a span of time that was marked by nothing but mediocracy.

Now let's look at our struggling black or anyb other minority man that the film was depicting as having to struggle by society's standards, fighting the wind, being knocked down again, fighting to remain courageous, and falling down in relapses. He may aget married, he may have children, he may be fired from his job for being a color or particular ethnicity or he may not. He may struggle daily with the injustice or he may encounter it every so often. At any rate he struggles to remain at his full capacity as a human. He has nothing to prove but his own strength and conviction to himself. At the end of this man' s life lets say that he collapses a little more than midway athrough the miles of the race and this man looks back on his life as a testimony to his unending conviction to live a life and love the life he lived. Who was the winner?

With my confusing example I would like to mention that the tables can be turned to describe any race opr gender.

[Nxixcxk]

Now let's look at our struggling black or anyb other minority man that the film was depicting as having to struggle by society's standards, fighting the wind, being knocked down again, fighting to remain courageous, and falling down in relapses.

Now to view the plight of the individual....

[ex_banana-eater]

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