The trough of understanding

I grew up in a town that was nearly all-white. As you'd expect, we had plenty of racism, a fact I was never clearer about than when my family adopted two children from Hong Kong. I saw enough small-minded cruelty directed at my siblings that I hope it won't sound like nostalgic white-washing of the past if I say most people, even in North Canton in the 1980s, were not viciously racist. 1987 was not 1957 and certainly not 1857. If people had not yet begun to understand racism on a deeper level yet--we didn't know what a microaggression was, much less how to distinguish between systemic racism on a macro level and individual bigotry on a person-to-person level--at least most people understood that you should not target another person for cruelty based on how that person looked on the outside. I think most people even understood that the chief reason why you shouldn't wasn't that you would get in trouble for it, but because the person receiving the cruelty was also a human with feelings that needed to be considered.

But if we escaped being an openly dangerous place for minorities, we still developed our own peculiar beliefs about race. We really thought we had it figured out. Racial turmoil didn't exist in North Canton, and we somehow thought that was because we were better at the whole race thing than places where racial conflict existed. It never occurred to us that with twenty black people and a dozen Asians in a city of 15,000, we lacked the quorum necessary for actual conflict between groups with differing interests.

One of the chestnuts I often heard in my hometown about racism was this: "The only people who are racists are those who have never met anyone of another race. Once you get out in the world and meet other people, you see that they're just like you and the hatred goes away." I think this was really just a back-handed way for people to humble-brag that THEY were high-minded enough to talk to one of the few minorities on hand. THEY could at least name a person of color they knew personally, and that was why they were so not racist.

It was a problematic way of thinking, to say the least. We really were a town that used token minorities to prove how not racist we were. There was something of a class component to this--"racism" was what they had in nearby Louisville, where it was rumored the Klan still existed. We weren't those trashy hicks, by God. We really were not able to see that an appropriate level of surface non-racism was something we used like automobiles or houses to set ourselves apart socially from poorer places.

North Canton, Ohio thinks of the dogwood as its official tree. We didn't have an official flower that I knew about, but this might have been it if we did. 

But beyond that, the idea that racism stems from lack of familiarity is just not something I've ever seen hold true in the wide world since I left North Canton. I wouldn't quite be so glib as to say the opposite is true; I'm a misanthrope, but not to that extent. What is true is that when most people come into contact with a culture that is outside their own there is something of a parabola of learning and adaptation.

At first, after making the decision to jump into another culture, it's surprising how easy it is to learn about and accept other cultures. The other person might look different from you, but he's still a person, and you can still relate to one another on many levels without too much trouble, even if you don't speak the same language. You congratulate yourself for how adventurous you are, how cosmopolitan. It feels like getting the hang of understanding this other culture is going to be a breeze. But the whole time you think you're sailing along, you've actually been fooled into thinking it would all be easy because you've been headed downhill.

That's when you realize that people who are different from you are actually...different. Truly and significantly different. At times annoyingly different.

DLI

I'm one of the tens of thousands of people who attended the military's foreign language school, Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. DLI's students are mostly on the young side. They've been to their service's basic training or boot camp, maybe one other short stop (for Marines, like I was, it was four weeks of basic infantry training), and then on to DLI. Over 90% of the population is under 25, and a good number of that is probably under 20, like I was when I started.

Clearly, I was a lot more mature in the Marine Corps than most of the people I was in with. As you can see, they all appreciated my maturity. 

Boot camp had already offered me a bit of a different world, racially, from the one I grew up in. Nearly half the people in my platoon at boot camp were black, as well as three of my four drill instructors. But boot camp is all non-stop action. There's really not enough time to develop racial tension. In fact, because we were all facing a common enemy in the drill instructors and because we were all just trying to make it through a tough twelve weeks, if anything, there was probably more racial harmony in our squad bay than there is in most mixed-race environments in America. It was tempting at that point to judge that my hometown had it right: all you needed to do in order to get along with others was come into contact with them, and it would all work itself out on its own.

Then came DLI. You'd think DLI would be a place where racism would be less of a problem than it was in most of the rest of the military. We had a population selected for its intelligence. While many of us were young, some had been to college or even graduated. We should have been the group that knew better. And for the first few weeks of class, that was true.

For a while, we all thought Mr. Pak was cool, we all tolerated Mrs. Go even though she was kind of old and weird, and we thought Mr. Lee was smart. When it was time for class to start, we greeted the teacher and gave him our attention, because that's what we were told students in Korea did for their instructors. We wanted to show our instructors as much respect as they would receive in Korea, because we readily accepted the whole notion of jumping into another culture. We thought a good attitude was really all it would take.

But six months into the course, everything had changed. We were sullen about what seemed to us to be the instructors' authoritarian wishes to be honored all the time. There were grumblings about how they smelled like garlic, how they were weird and un-American and how Confucian philosophy had set them back a thousand years. I heard some of the terms for Asian people nobody should ever say. And it wasn't just the Korean students. Back at the Marine barracks, I heard occasional epithets from Marines in the Arabic class about those sand n***ers or towel heads. (I hasten to add that I doubt you'd hear these things today. In the early 90s, the Marines had come a long way to eliminating that kind of ugly bias, but it wasn't gone.)

The worst part about this kind of racial antagonism is that students who had been through the better portion of the basic course at DLI had reason to believe they knew what they were talking about. Nobody could tell them their dislike for another group was rooted in ignorance. They could say: "We've learned about them! We've learned a lot about them, actually, including how to speak their language to some extent. This isn't ignorance; it's the opposite."

It was the classic little bit of learning that Alexander Pope warned could be a dangerous thing. We had drunk deep enough from the well of another culture to realize we'd been lied to when we'd been told people were basically the same. But we hadn't kept drinking long enough to come out the other end and realize that there was a far more profound, mysterious, and even dangerous unifying thread running through humanity than we'd ever dreamed. Unfortunately, a good number of students never got that far. They graduated from DLI, did as little language work in the military as they could get away with, and never studied it again, secure in the knowledge that theirs wasn't just an ignorant bigotry, it was an educated dislike.

I saw this repeated again when I lived in Korea for a few years. A lot of the military-related American community there really liked Korean people, but also grew, over their time there, to strongly dislike parts of Korean culture that were profoundly different. A lot of Americans spoke patronizingly of the "K-factor" whenever we got an answer from a Korean we worked with that didn't make sense and the Korean person was unable to explain the logic tof the answer.

It's only after sticking with it for a very long time that the logic some answers (or non-answers) begin to make some sense to a foreigner. I wouldn't say I've achieved this level (although the always-kind-about-how-good-my-Korean-is Korean people often tell me how "Koreanized" I've become). But I think I've kept at it long enough and hard enough that I've come through the valley and started up the other side. Phew. Now I only need to do this for the other 5,000 ethnicities on Earth, and I'll be somewhat enlightened about my fellow man.

What's the lesson?

I am tempted to draw a simple lesson from what I've witnessed about the trough of understanding other people. Something like how it helps if we all have a common purpose, like we did in boot camp. That's a cliche that probably is true to some extent, of course--there's a reason many of America's first breakthroughs in racial barriers came in the military and sports. But I think a more important lesson is to not simplify how easy racial issues and the cultural barriers that come with them will be to bridge.

Hillary Clinton, the consummate safe politician, often retreated during the 2016 election into the talking point that "we're stronger together." It sounds good, but anyone who's gone more than a few feet down the trough of understanding knows that talking point is far tidier than reality. American togetherness, the plurality of cultures and races that have come to define us, is, in many ways, more difficult than homogeneity. Korea doesn't have racial issues like we do, because it's more than 95% made up of Koreans.

We all know that the reality of dealing with difference is tougher than a slogan like "better together." For people who come from profoundly different places, being better together is an iffy proposition. It requires a lot of work on our part for us to really be better with one another. That's why Trump was able to drive holes through that narrative with a counter-narrative: Look at what all this cultural awareness and plurality has gotten us. We see riots in American cities, because citizens think the police are targeting them. We are losing our "American culture," and people who've lived here their whole lives are seeing the country they knew become unrecognizable. America's focus on racial awareness hasn't improved our racial problems; it's made it worse by keeping them ever at the forefront of our minds.

It's a mesmerizing message for an America that is descending into the trough. Every decision we've made to try to undo our original sin of allowing slavery, along with the many other sins that followed, has resulted in making life a little more problematic, at least for white people. These kinds of decisions make us question truths we thought we knew and ask hard questions, like what fairness really means and how we take the right steps to get there without making it worse. That's actually a sign that we're headed in the right direction. If it feels easy, then you're in the lie on top of the hill in front of the valley. The fact that life has gotten harder since we committed to racial equality in all its elusiveness means we're on the long path to truth and, if we're lucky, a deeper reconciliation. If it were easy, it would mean we're not really on the road.

I think the lesson for me is that we can't try to present an image that fighting for understanding in such a pluralistic society is ever going to be easy or maybe even pleasant. It's a dogfight. It's going to mean people are uncomfortable. All too often, the message seems to be that we can both have our multi-cultural society and still live at ease. We can't. Worse, the message is sometimes that just because it's the right thing to do, it's actually going to make things better in an obvious way. It won't. We commit to it because we believe it is right, even though there are difficulties that come with it.

We already live in a society where everyone is at least occasionally going to feel not at home. We are all in that valley in some sense, all living among at least some people we don't quite understand and aren't sure we're up to getting to understand. The choices are to stay in the valley or push through it. Going back to where we started from sounds nice, but it's just not an option anymore. In a country that feels a little bit foreign to all of us, we can either put in the work and believe it will pay off in some way we cannot yet see, or we can just stay here, angry, wanting to be alone, and missing the way things were.