The comforting thing about racism is that it's never far away---everywhere you go, there it is. Racism is one of those universal human aspects that never lets me down, no matter where I travel on this confused little planet. It's particularly resistant to intelligent thinking. Or logic. Or compassion. Or understanding. It's heartier than the most resilient bacteria and just as prolific; I can find it down the street, across town, or across the international date line. It's like the internet---it's global.
The never ending assault on the continents' indigenous cultures, the civilizations that thrived and flourished for thousands of years before European white people came along and told them they were doing it all wrong, is particularly noteworthy. Consider two communities, ten thousand miles apart---Blanding, Utah and Alice Springs, Northern Territory in Australia. In both towns, two cultures live side-by-side and barely acknowledge each other's existence.
Ken Sleight has been writing about racial injustice in San Juan County for the last three years and has become a regular thorn in the side of the white politicians down there. The complaint I hear about Ken's essays is always the same: "Why is Sleight trying to stir up the Indians?" Their bellyache reminds me of southern white complaints in 1961 about the Freedom Riders. Keep 'em in their place and they won't realize how bad they have it. It's amazing to me that Sleight hasn't had his head crushed. Or San Juan County Commissioner Mark Maryboy either, Utah's only native American county commissioner. (See Sleight's story about Mark on page 18)
But like many of the Good Ol' Bigots of the Old South, white people who complain about 'uppity' Indians are often 100% cowards when it comes to having the courage of their convictions. One outspoken critic of the Navajos threatened to sue this publication if I so much as mentioned his/her name. That "tell-it-like-it-is" critic may be white, but I detect a very wide yellow streak running down the back.
I don't mean to suggest that everyone in Blanding and San Juan County is so narrow-minded. But there is the sense that many of the white people would be a lot happier if the Navajos would just go away. It's the same elsewhere in America.
Driving across the Great Plains, a journey I seem compelled to take each summer, reveals the same bias. Where a great culture once thrived, now broken and scattered reservations are all that remain. The buffalo that once numbered 60 million, are gone. The communities that now inhabit the prairie show no sign whatsoever of the Lakota or the Cheyennes.
Now travel 10,000 miles west and south to Australia. When the Englishman James Cook sailed into Botany Bay more than two centuries ago, he encountered its original inhabitants. The 200,000 Aboriginal people living in Australia at the time of its "discovery" by the British had inhabited the continent for more than 40,000 years. At least 600 different tribes, many separated by language and custom, still managed to co-exist and flourish in the Land Down Under.
But the whites, offended by the Aboriginals' lack of ambition or civilization (as defined by the newcomers) systematically set out to remove them from the continent, or at least from the more fertile and productive parts of the land. By 1860, less than 80 years after the first white settlement, barely 20,000 Aborigines remained---90% of the population was eliminated.
In the last several years, some of Australia's white citizens and its courts have attempted to address and even make amends for its racist past. But it has brought out the ugly and sordid side of many Australians as well. The newest and fastest growing political movement in the country right now, the One Nation Party, is unabashedly racist in its appeal to whites. Its leader, Pauline Hanson, is the George Wallace of Queensland, Australia. She takes bigotry and intolerance and wraps them in vague populist rhetoric.
In Alice Springs, the Aboriginals and the Whites live in the same town and in a different dimension. They do not acknowledge each other. They pass on the street and they don't look at each other. A small aboriginal child had fallen down on the sidewalk and was crying for his mother, who had stepped inside a store. The whites walked over the child without missing a step. They didn't even seem to notice the cries. It was weird. Instead of passing around each other, I almost believed that it was possible for the Whites and the Aboriginals to pass through each other.
Once during that trip, I was camping along the coast south of Sydney and struck up a conversation with a group of fishermen. They were congenial for the most part, but one of them, Larry by name, was looking for an argument.
"So what do you think of our Aboriginal situation?" he asked threateningly.
"I think they've had a pretty rough time of it since you white guys took over," I replied.
Larry shook his head with disgust. "I figured you to be a bleedin' heart. Let me tell you what the abos are...they're nothing but a bunch of lazy good-for-nothing dole bludgers. They're worthless."
I felt a certain weary deja vu come over me. Why I thought arguing with Larry might accomplish anything, I'll never know. But instead of just walking away from this moron, I stuck around for a while. We went back and forth. We made little or no progress.
Finally I proposed this simple analogy. "Ok Larry, think about this. Imagine for a moment that all the Aboriginal people are kangaroos and all white people are horses."
"What? What're you talking about?" he said confused.
"Just bear with me for a moment," I answered. "Imagine that all the Aboriginals are kangaroos and they are very good at it. Consider that they were very good at it for years. For centuries. For 60,000 years, in fact. They made excellent kangaroos.
"Then one day, the British arrived...the horses...and said, 'It's not good for you to be kangaroos anymore. From now on you should act like horses. In fact, you have no choice. You must act like horses, or you will perish.'"
"So after much resistance, the Aboriginals, the kangaroos, tried to act like horses. But they weren't any good at being horses. They couldn't be what they weren't. Kangaroos make lousy horses."
I searched Larry's eyes for signs of enlightenment. "Do you see the point I'm trying to make?"
Larry pulled another beer from the cooler and took a long swig. "If I'm a horse, mate, you're a horse's ass."
There was no reaching Larry.
There is no reaching a lot of people. They simply don't get it. And the streets of Moab and Blanding and Sydney and Adelaide are full of Larrys. I suppose they will be around for a long, long time, even if, hopefully, in dwindling numbers.
Sometimes I hear politicians propose that we should show "tolerance" for other cultures and other ways of life. That's not good enough. How about respect? Or admiration? The Native American culture, to me, has much to respect and to emulate. I don't propose that we all try to become Indians. I'm a white guy and all I can hope to be is a better white guy. But I can learn from other cultures how to be a better human being. And in case anyone forgot, that's what we all are.