We may be more same than we think we are…

Book club tomorrow -- I make a note. It’s been a while. I think of our last meeting in August. It is a beautiful summer evening and we sit outside, under the trees, in the fresh summer breeze.

The conversation veers to the Powerball which is over 700 million. The conversation moves to how much good at least part of the money can be put to. A friend asks what each of us would do if we won. We are a small group of five. Nobody has a lottery ticket, but 700 million is swiftly disbursed. 

A friend knows exactly where she would want her wins to go -- on diversity education and reform. She speaks passionately against discrimination and how much needs to happen. She is white American and states emphatically that reform needs to come from white Americans for it to matter. Everybody agrees. Everybody has something to add. 

Oddly I am quiet. I am the only one who is brown. I am the only one with an accent.

And although I have plenty of opinions and plenty to say. I am quiet. My friend continues to talk passionately about discrimination and when she catches a breath, I simply say I am glad she’s my friend. Even if I haven’t met her or most of them since that day, I am grateful to know a group that will have this discussion. There are many many others who will have this discussion for recent politics have brought like-minded people together and pushed the need to speak up and act.

My friend speaks about a racist experience. And although it is not targeted towards her, it enrages her.  I am oddly quiet. I am processing the fact that intolerance and bigotry affects everyone to almost the same extent. Not only the “minorities”.

For when these unsavory events happen, they happen to everyone, there is hate everywhere. No one is spared. Not even the most white, straight person in the room. There are no individual victims, even if it seems there are. Everyone is affected. Everyone is a victim.

I think of the time I walk into an auditorium for a talk with a friend. My bag is checked. My friend and those around me do not go through a bag-check. They are all white. I look at the guy in askance. I remember how awful my friend feels. Color notwithstanding, all decent people are victims in times of discrimination for what is wrong is wrong and the yucky feeling inside feels the same, even if degrees may vary.

I realize the power of this discussion in a mixed group. I imagine many such discussions are happening in many communities within certain boundaries of homogeneity. A group of hijab-wearing women may discuss diversity and acceptance and bigotry and their experiences therein, as may a group of Indians or Asians, or Blacks or transgender.

But I notice the strength in a discussion in a diverse groups where people have varied perspectives and experiences. And at the risk of sounding overly simplistic and optimistic, we notice we are so different, yet so seamlessly same.

Besides, our world, especially in the US is multicolored. Will we wait till we have a black sister-in-law, or an asian son-in-law or a brown spouse or a gay kid, to be sensitive? For it will happen. Even to the most conservative right wing folks. Do we wait till then, to notice that we hardly even notice those “differences” in our interactions? That their being “different” has nothing to do with why we love them or why we get annoyed with them.

Some months ago, my daughter’s friend joins her for game night at her sports place. I have my arm around her shoulder, when another dad looks at us and says, “She did great at the tournament today”.

I laugh, thank him and say, “this is her friend…” I love it that he mistakes her for my kid, despite her blue eyes and light skin and hair. He assumes she’s my kid (and I will happily assume so too – she loves my Indian food more than my own kid and has on occasion responded when I’ve accidentally spoken to her in Marathi).

It makes me think, we must be wired to believe in community based on our acceptance and interaction between us. Just as easily as this man mistakes this kid to be my daughter (and I’ll take that in a heartbeat), based on our interaction and body language and familiarity between us, that is all that should matter. That is all that can matter. 

For at the heart of it, we are wired together by a thread of humanity tying us together, beneath all the differences. And all we can hope is that this thread proves stronger than our differences.