Should We Be More Open-Minded?
What if we saw more of each others’ humanity?
A few months ago, I found myself talking to a card-carrying white supremacist. I don’t mean that he opposed Critical Race Theory or voted for Trump or whatever other ridiculous definition some folks on the too-online far-left think constitutes white supremacy. I mean that he genuinely believed that African Americans represented an intellectually and morally inferior species as compared to white people.
As I was talking to this man, I realized something. I wasn’t going into this conversation with a particularly open mind. I wasn’t going to reasonably evaluate his evidence or agree to meet in the middle on the issue of whether or not one race is genetically inferior to another. I’m opposed to the theory known as “race realism“ and I wasn’t going to budge on it.
To put it another way: I was close-minded on this topic…and I was okay with that.
I think a lot of us have issues like this. I have friends who know undocumented immigrants, and they’re just not going to budge on the question of whether or not ICE is doing a good job. I have other friends who have worked with battered women, and they’re simply not going to budge on the question of whether or not trans-identifying males ought to be allowed in women’s shelters.
And I think that’s okay.
But if I couldn’t be open-minded about the issue of “race realism” in my conversation with my white supremacist friend, what could I be open-minded about?
I could be open-minded about him.
I could choose to write him off as a one-dimensional villain. Or, I could choose to listen to his story and to let his experiences and his pain and his humanity influence how I saw him.
As we talked, I got the sense that he had had a lot of bad experiences with black men and women growing up in the inner city. I got the sense that he had been genuinely frightened by some of these people, possibly at a young age.
Hearing this man’s story didn’t change my perception of the black community. But it did change my perception of him. Away from a one-note bigot, and towards a man trying his best to process what were probably some brutally painful experiences.
I don’t think hate is the kind of thing that grows in a person naturally. I think we have to be hurt into hating each other. As I focused less on this man’s hate, and more on the hurt that spawned it, I felt myself develop a new perspective towards him.
I’ll give another example, a little bit more removed.
One of my favorite rappers is Eminem. In his track Rap God, he says of his critics that:
“They’re askin’ me to eliminate some of the women hate
/ But if you take into consideration the bitter hatred
/ I have, then you may be a little patient
/ And more sympathetic to the situation
/ And understand the discrimination”
Eminem’s known for his misogynistic lyrics, and while some are almost certainly tongue-in-cheek, others reveal a real bitterness towards the fairer sex. But his formative experience with women was also, by all accounts, terrible. His mother was a drug addict. She was abusive to the point that his eight-year-old brother was taken away to foster care. When Eminem became famous, his mother sued him.
My point is not to adjudicate Eminem’s broken relationship with his mother. My point is: if my formative experiences with women included a mother who sued me and who was abusive to the point that foster care took away my brother, I would probably have a strained relationship with women too. In Rap God, we see a man who’s asking for what most of us want: understanding of his complexity as a human being and of the pain that formed his personality, rather than simply judgment towards his actions.
It all reminds me of something that the national depolarization nonprofit Braver Angels says: “Our goal is not to change people’s views of issues, but to change their views of each other.”
I think we can all stand to see see a little bit more of God’s image in those people across the aisle. Maybe we can do this even if we never budge on the actual issues.
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