The Blind Spot

We all have a blind spot. Our eyes only focus one direction. We cannot see what is directly behind our eye... i.e. what is in our own brains. This is the main problem with humanity. As Jesus reminded us, we have a log in our own eye.

As a White Male in these United States, I have been born into a position of supremacy and become a guardian of cultural purity. Now, nowhere have I been told this directly, but it has been intimated to me many times.

I was raised in San Francisco - one of the most diverse cities on the planet - and I was taught from the earliest age that we all live in a big melting pot and that we are all Americans and that differences don't matter. As a young kid, you nod your head and say, "Uh huh." Because being diverse is just as difficult as learning to tie your shoes and learning the multiplication tables. In other words, its just another subject to learn. We soak it all in at a young age and we learn things that we can't even put into words - like the fact that there are book facts and fact facts, and the world is divided into these two realms that often don't see eye to eye.

My young existence was marred by my mother not being around. I was raised a great deal by my grandmother and by my step-mother. But for a long chunk of time, there was just my Dad. My Dad was struggling with three kids and bills to pay, but he managed to keep us sane, if not entirely well off. I remember distinctly having a series of "baby-sitters" during tax seasons that would look after the three of us in different ways. One had a house down by the beach and we would spend our afternoons in a basement watching old reruns of the Mickey Mouse Club. One of them was an elderly black lady who lived in the Projects down off Fillmore and who liked to punish kids the old fashioned southern way ("Go outside and find me a switch... and it better not break when it hits your backside!") In grade school I saw it all. My friends were Chinese, Hawaiian, Filipino, Black, White, Blue, Jewish, Swedish, Hindi, you name it. I never once questioned it. Not once.

Which doesn't mean I wasn't aware of intolerance. We all found gay people to be strange. And as this was the 70's and the Harvey Milk movement was in full swing, it was hard not to notice them. But, at that age, what we knew of gay people - they might as well have been martians. Still, I remember using all the slang of that era to talk about them. I remember loving dirty racial jokes as well - the white one's as much as the one's about other races. Quite frankly, I just liked jokes. But this was another example of the book world vs. the real world. We were told that we were all the same, but the battle lines were already being drawn as we headed off to Jr. High School.

And this is where I began to learn of a casual racism that pervades most of society. It is the racism of "those people". Those people, over there, who are not like the people here - whom I know. The idea that the black people I know are cool and I'm cool with them, so that means I'm not racist, but the rest of black people are shiftless, lazy, etc... I did not understand it at first. And I don't think it a recent phenomenon. I admit, in darker moments, to being a strong proponent of similar views. Situational racism is the most common type. It seems to be a part of human nature to view those around you with one set of eyes and those who are not near you with another set - so that if someone near you is behaving poorly, it reflects on everyone like them. But if a person near you is being friendly, well, that only reflects on the person near you. Everyone becomes suspect, then, until they prove themselves acceptable.

This is a most destructive view because it allows the idea of racism to continue, but gives everyone the illusion that they are not perpetuating it. It also props up the entire idea of reverse descrimination, which is just another insidious form of racism that hides under the auspices of acceptability. I learned about reverse descrimination as well from Jr. High when it was spelled out to me by people concerned with my educational goals that if I wanted to get into a really good high school I had to score higher on my tests and get better grades than my fellow students of color... or women (which I never understood). In essence, as a White Male, I had to have the best grades and the best test scores to get the best education. Otherwise, I would be passed over by people with lesser grades and lesser test scores because of the color of their skin or because of their sex. Even in Jr. High, I didn't have any illusion that this was another form of racism being propped up by people who thought they were doing the right thing.

So where has this left me as an adult? Confused, mostly. I don't consider myself to be part of a race. I consider myself to be a human being, and a Christian, and an American. It is only when confronted by examples of racism - either being done to me or to someone else - that I even remember that I am a White Male American. At times I feel like I am being punished for the sins of my fathers unto the umpteenth generation. I see things and I hear things and I feel things and I say things that I know to be racist, and it seems like I just can't get away from it. My heart, my soul, bleeds everytime I encounter it, but I know of no way to stop it.

Fittingly, Jesus said not to judge by what we see until we can remove the log from our own eyes, but He did not tell us how we might achieve that. Since perhaps our vision will always be flawed, and we will always have this blind spot that prevents us from viewing our own sins, we should instead seek to find a safe way to conduct ourselves that affords us the ability to look past people's differences and towards some sort of standard of conduct that is universally accepted. We should, instead, seek to forgive each other their flaws, and accept people for who they are, and not what they aren't. We should, perhaps, learn to love them unconditionally.