COLUMN: Connect with unfamiliar cultures
A big-boned, raspy-voiced African-American woman with a thick Midwestern accent with an enthusiastic voice said to my 14-year-old self, “Sing with me baby girl.”
I was not accustomed to such invitations in the Walmart checkout line. I was taken back as she began to vicariously dance and sing to some rap song I had never heard of. Not only was this musical behavior in the checkout line slightly disturbing to my perfect life paradigm, but, for the first time in my life, I experienced the overwhelming feeling of being a racial minority.
My family just moved from Cache Valley, Utah, to a suburb of Indianapolis. In many instances throughout my high school years, I was a white face in a sea of color. When I quickly realized my paradigm had room for change and progress, my perception shifted from scared white girl to sister, friend and neighbor.
A thin, raspy-voiced African-American woman with broken English said to my 16-year-old self in the Walmart checkout line, “Sing with me lady.”
I did not think twice to join in her zealous song and dance rendition to Hurricane Curtis’s chorus of the song “Ay Bay Bay.” I now know her life-song meant something to her, and her invitation was a chance to share 15 seconds of understanding between two vastly different human beings.
Using our differences as an excuse for hatred and bullying is unacceptable. As a nation and a university, the line between tolerance for others and bullying is quickly growing thinner. Whether you are male or female, religious or non-religious, conservative or liberal, gay or straight, black or white, or anywhere in between, your majority or minority status should never stand as acceptable grounds for an absence of compassion and kindness.
Living in a highly religious community, religious reasons are the natural come-to-mind example of how some in the majority can take teachings of what should be love, compassion and kindness to become an identity of superiority, bringing down those in the minority — liberals, the LGBT community, feminists, non-LDS and so on. That being said, let me first address the religiously devoted and, in my perspective, the dominant group of USU’s population.
In general, Christianity supports living a Christ-like life and patterning behavior after God’s perfect son. Last time I checked, Christ loved everyone regardless of their social status — the Jew and Gentile, the sinners and minorities, the adulterers and sick.
We must remember that claiming unconditional love but only if one adheres to degrading conditional lists is hypocrisy at its finest. After all, Christ himself was a minority, and to many groups around the world, you are a minority.
To the various minority groups: It is also greatly hypocritical to fight for individualism, tolerance and acceptance, but not accept the individualism and right to opinion of the dominant culture. Your minority status is not an excuse for hatred — the same hatred that so deeply feeds your passion for societal change.
I know it is not feasible to demand everyone love everyone. But it is feasible to step out of our ethnocentric views and still work to advance our goals without causing traumatic and emotional damage to those who differ in opinion. It is wonderful and liberating to feel passion and push a cause you believe in — I would not be writing this if I did not agree with this notion.
I will continue to advocate for feminism and wrestle for pragmatic solutions to the growing wealth disparity in the U.S. I will speak up for minorities, children and the oppressed. I expect others to wholeheartedly disagree with my beliefs and fight for the causes they deeply care for. But because we have different causes does not justify us using them to rank ourselves as better than others and as a reason for hatred.
According to the National Coalition of Health Professional Education in Genetics (NCHPEG), “The fact that any two humans are approximately 99.9 percent identical at the DNA sequence level indicates that we are genetically quite similar to one another.”
To get more specific and compare humans on a more global scale, NCHPEG states, “When averaged over the entire genome, about 85 to 90 percent of the genetic diversity present in the human species can be found in any human group.”
Essentially, two individuals from entirely different continents would be expected to genetically differ by a mere 10-15 percent more than two individuals from the same continent. Humans are more alike than I think most of us prefer to acknowledge. How much better would the world be if we could join as one human race to learn each other’s songs and allow ourselves into each other’s paradigms? Let’s stop the hatred and focus on the 99.9 percent similarities we share.
Let’s learn to dance and sing harmoniously together in the checkout lines of life.
— Tyra Simmons is a senior majoring in sociology. Her column runs every other week. Comments on her column can be sent to
tyrasimmons@gmail.com.