On "Healing"

From a recent NBC/WSJ poll:

One Katrina-related story that has grabbed headlines is that many of the Gulf Coast residents who couldn't escape the storm were poor and minorities. According to the NBC/Journal poll, only 37 percent agree with the statement that the Bush administration would have acted with greater urgency had the affected areas been mostly white suburban communities. But there is a huge discrepancy by race here: Seventy percent of African Americans agree with the statement, while 67 percent of whites disagree.

Since the Katrina disaster, there has been a lot of talk about race as an issue in the response, mostly among Black victims and advocates, as the poll numbers show. In response to what appears to have been a racially biased response by the federal government, many people (of all ethnic groups) have been talking about healing the racial divide in America (even though poverty is the true issue). Nice thought, but it neglects the fact that race relations in America have never been healthy in the first place.

To heal something implies that it was once healthy, and it just needs to be returned to its original healthy state. We have never had a healthy relationship between whites and other racial groups in America. Therefore, there is nothing to heal.

Healthy race relations would be a completely new emergent in this country. It is not something that we can "heal" into existence; it is something we must grow into for the first time. What Katrina has done, if anything good can come from such horror, is expose the truth of the situation. More than forty years after the major Civil Rights legislation, we are still a racially divided nation. We can not change that with laws.

We must grow beyond the predominately narrow ethnocentric moral stance that prevails in this country and adopt a more expansive, compassionate worldcentric stance -- one that is blind to skin color and that celebrates the beauty of our diversity. We must grow into this view in our hearts and minds -- it's a change that must be made from the inside out.