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Jan 15, 2001
Martin Luther King Day
...and the occasion for one last year-in-review. This time to treat diversity not through variety, but in the way the same place differs over the course of the year. A lot of our identity problems stem from...well, our identity, or our insistence on the sanctity of the same. And I mean “same” literally. Our faith that our ever changing selves, no less our social or racial groups, represent a continuity, and a signal truth: that while all may change around us, we remain ourselves; the same. All else must be measured by its failure to be us. Maybe we’d feel less proprietary if we changed our looks from season to season, the way so many plants and animals do. Race is just a way of dealing with local circumstances, but we are the great generalizers, learning to deal with these through cultural and technological means, while our bodies have not caught up with our languages. Our forms retain biological solutions to specifics of environments we have left behind. But we are still the same people, Black or White, as a bird, the Loon, say, is the same, though in its different plumages, of Winter or of Spring. An Oak is an Oak, with or without leaves. All of which brings up the point that in order to really know an Oak, or any tree, you’ve got to know its variant faces: its naked limbs; its Winter buds; its leaves, both green and red. Just so, we won’t learn all that Humanity might be, unless we are willing to learn more about it than we know about ourselves. The only ones who can teach us this are the Others.Give them a chance.