We All Bring Something To The Table

Then a Mexican-American man stepped forward and said, ?I was often hungry as a child.?  I watched as every person of color in the room ? people of Asian, African, Latino and Indigenous descent ? stepped into the circle.  Every white person in the room remained standing on the outside.  

 

Soon thereafter, a middle-aged white woman stepped into the circle, saying:  ?I was often lonely as a child.?  To my amazement, every white person in the room stepped into the circle, but not a single person of color. 

 

That moment has stayed with me ever since.  What lay behind the seeming inverse relationship between hunger and loneliness?  Was it just chance that those in our group whose skin was brown or black had all known physical hunger in childhood, while no one who was white had had this experience?  And that all the white people in the group had often known loneliness as children, and none of the people of color?  Or is it possible that there was more to what took place in that workshop than coincidence?  Did our little exercise touch on larger social and political dynamics at work in our times?

 

Sometimes, material hardships can bring people together.  Family, community and culture become more important when people depend on their support in order to survive.  This is not to glorify poverty, but rather to recognize that every life circumstance can carry its own challenges and gifts.  Sometimes, people focus so much on obtaining material wealth and individual success, that they lose touch with the critical importance of human relationships. 

 

I?m 36 years old, and for more than half my life I?ve been convening intentionally diverse groups of young leaders with the goal of building bridges of understanding and partnership across historic divides like race, class, gender, nationality and religion.  I?ve been drawn to this work because I see how such differences have for centuries been a source of separation and even violence.  And because I keep wondering whether we might have some valuable, perhaps even vital, gifts to give and receive from people who are different from us. 

 

Most often, people congregate or segregate by being around people like themselves.  In country clubs and jazz clubs, in churches and raves, in gangs and in internet chat rooms, most of us, most of the time, are hanging out with people because they have something in common with us.  The idea of engaging with people who are different can feel scary and destabilizing. Even with all the talk about the glory of diversity, and even with all the ways that segregation has been shunned to the point of becoming a dirty word, most of us feel safer and more trusting with people like us.

 

The question is: how do we define ?us??  Will we inherit without examination conventional divisions of race, class, gender and political perspective?  Or will we allow our definition of ?us? to grow wider?  If we long to live into and help create a healthier, safer, and more sustainable world, we are not alone.  If we are distressed by the course of things in our world today, and feel that something precious is being lost in our times, we are not alone.  If we want to be motivated more by the dreams of our children than by the inherited fears of previous eras, if we want to not only survive but to thrive, if we want to make a difference with our lives, we are not alone.  We are joined, in fact, by billions. Many of those billions do not look, talk, or think quite the same way that we do, but each could have something to contribute to the dreams we carry.